


Terra Firma

by Tayine



Series: The Man from UNCLE Continuation [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst, Biological Warfare, Canon Compliant, Dubious Morality, Espionage, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Mission Fic, Post-Canon, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-04-20 22:15:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 48,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4804217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tayine/pseuds/Tayine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The three founding agents of UNCLE have been working together for several months when a new foe rises, this one unknown and all the more dangerous for it. When one of their own is stricken with a mysterious plague-like weapon that could potentially take down the entire western European seaboard, Napoleon, Illya, and Gaby have to confront their worst fears about working together and apart, questioning the rationale of being involved with something so much greater than the sum of its parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Abyss

“You know,” Napoleon mused to Illya, shouting over the roar of the engines, “It seems like life has gotten much more complicated lately.”

The burly Russian grunted as he countered a blow from the masked assailant he was fighting, rocking awkwardly on the metal belly of the plane as it rumbled and shook.

“Less chitchat!” screamed Gaby from the pilot’s chair in the cockpit, her tiny figure dwarfed by the big gaping hole that used to be a windshield and which now opened up onto pure blue sky. Her normally-prim hair was whipping around her face by the winds as she struggled with the stick, trying to pull the plane up from its catastrophic dive.

“I’m only observing that these last few months with you two have been rather stimulating,” Napoleon called to her. His fingers were moving deftly over the steel container in the center of the otherwise-empty body of the disabled aircraft. Illya was taking on three guys at once, protecting his partner from the men as they each broke away from the scuffle and rushed Napoleon, trying to distract or stop him from getting into the box. The Russian was doing his damnedest to keep all three back with him near the tail of the cavernous space inside the plane, even if it meant having the tar beat out of him. These enemies were trained well and trained fierce, and it had been ever the ordeal just to get aboard the plane before it had taken off from some tiny airstrip just outside Casablanca.

“Solo, I swear to god, if I have to come back there-”

“No, no, we’re doing fine!” he chirped. He was in a pretty good mood for experiencing a near freefall with no parachutes. He was good at stealing, and he was good at pushing his teammates’ buttons, and getting to do both at one time was a real treat. He was having the time of his life, if he was going to be perfectly honest, which again was a rare delight.

The long, steel box, shaped like an oversize footlocker, had inside it a cache of documents which were vital for their mother organizations to intercept. The UNCLE agents had not been told exactly what was on these papers, but the grim-faced and stone-voiced commanding officers for each of the countries’ secret services had all been very clear: get the intel.

The last of the many intricate locks snapped open. Napoleon clicked his tongue and plunged his hand into the box. It came out empty.

“Well, damn,” he said.

Gaby yanked on the throttle to maximize thrust, then grabbed for the yoke, standing on her heels and using all of her weight to lean backwards. One of the under-wing engines had been fired, leaving only one to do all the work and then some of keeping the plane level. By now there was nothing but gravity controlling it. All she could hope for was a mild crash landing, which, for someone who was flying an airplane for the first time in her life, was probably outside the realm of possibility. Still, she thought wryly to herself as she steered tons and tons of shrieking aluminum, more fantastic things had happened. Never in her wildest dreams had she thought she would ever be working as a British spy with an American and Communist together for one mission, let alone multiple.

The rushing blue and white of sky and clouds outside the cockpit gave way very suddenly to a deeper, more sinister blue of ocean. “Boys, we need to wrap this up!” she called.

Illya spun on his toes, ducking like a dancer, and came up like a hockey player, wrapping both of his arms around the waist of the nearest masked man who was still, foolishly, going toe-to-toe with him. He used his superior weight and strength to topple the man backwards, arching his back and tucking his head against his own chest. There was a sickening crack. The body beneath him went limp.

He rolled and sprang to his feet, preparing himself, but then Solo was there, exchanging pleasant boxer’s punches with the last man standing. Illya rolled his shoulders and then barreled the man from behind, eliciting a reproachful cry from the American.

“It is time to go,” the Russian said, getting to his feet once more and brushing off the lapels of his coat. The man at his feet groaned, stunned. He would not be getting up again for a while.

“You could have saved me one of them.”

“Chop Shop says it is time to go. Do you have the papers?”

Solo heaved a dramatic sigh and shook his head. “Either our intel was wrong or our superiors missed something.”

“Sounds like both.”

“Indeed. Gaby, how goes it?”

“Come and see for yourself!”

Both men walked, almost leisurely, up the belly of the plane to the cockpit, standing behind their teammate and watching as the nose of the aircraft pointed more and more into a downward direction. The fuel was nearly gone, Napoleon could see from one of the gauges. The depressurized interior and the lack of one of the engines propelling the craft forward was making trouble for the poor machine.

“Level it off,” instructed Illya, placing one hand on the headrest of the pilot’s chair. “We can skim the surface of the ocean and not die in a crash.”

“That’s the plan, yes,” growled Gaby through gritted teeth. “Both of you, take a seat.”

Napoleon and Illya glanced momentarily at each other and then over to the empty copilot’s chair before bumping shoulders in their haste to get to it. Napoleon was closer, though, and his bottom landed securely on the seat as he smirked at his partner. “Jump seat for you, my good man,” he grinned, indicating the tiny fold-out chair behind them. Illya sat himself down in it and hunched his shoulders, his bulk comical.

“Buckle in,” said Gaby, her brow furrowed as she concentrated. The wind was whipping her hair all around, her ponytail finally free, and she kept brushing it away from her face in annoyance as she wrestled with the aircraft.

“Allow me,” Illya said, standing up again and pulling her hair back from her cheeks and forehead with a featherlight touch. He gathered her hair into one meaty hand and held it gently, maintaining any loose strands that came loose again.

Gaby had gone quiet. Napoleon could see a slightly pink tinge rising on her cheeks. Outside, the ocean had swallowed the whole of the view outside the hole where the windshield had been, but Gaby had been a good pilot and had kept the plane from either spinning wildly or plummeting down in a straight-angled drop that would have meant death for them all.

As they approached the surface of the sea, Gaby murmured, “This might be a good time to tell you both that I am not a very good swimmer.”

“Luckily, Peril and I have spent more than our share of time in the water,” said Napoleon easily, unfazed as ever. “Haven’t we?”

The Russian nodded grimly, not in the mood to be teased. The trio had grown more and more at ease with each other as the months had passed, especially as their missions had seemed to grow more and more dangerous and global in scale, but they were each and every one still sensitive to a few things. For Illya, it was the idea that he’d ever had to be saved. That night at the shipping yard had not exactly won Napoleon his everlasting gratitude.

“We will keep you afloat,” he said to the woman, looking down at her as he held her hair behind her. She responded by flexing her fingers on the yoke.

“You need to put on a seatbelt,” she said quietly, barely audible under the roar of the winds. “This is going to be rough.”

Illya obeyed, sitting back in his tiny seat and strapping on the lap belt that would probably not do much in the way of keeping him from bouncing through the cockpit when the collision came. Napoleon and Gaby had on the much-safer chest restraints. The American prepared himself to stand by in case he had to catch his big partner by the ankle or something.

Gaby was muttering a constant stream of German underneath her breath in the last few seconds as she yanked backwards and tried to make the plane skim along on its belly, rather than plunging the nose into the sea like a knife and risk the fuselage telescoping from the impact. “Hold on, hold on, hold on!” she cried out.

The cockpit, angling slightly upwards at this point, faced the sun directly and flooded the inner plane with light for the briefest of seconds. Then the last few yards of the fuselage scraped the choppy surface, bouncing violently. Napoleon and Illya were shaken like ragdolls; Gaby, who had something to hold on to and had the foresight to brace her feet in the undercarriage of the control panel, fared slightly better.

“Fuck! Блядь! Scheiße!”

These exclamations came from all three, all at once, and then there was a great rending of metal and the roar of the sea as it sloshed against the intact airplane. The cockpit bounced one last time, rising up into the air and then falling back against the water, where it came to a bobbing rest, momentarily buoyant. Seawater had splashed into the cockpit and would soon upset the weight balance; they all needed to get out and away from the sinking craft as soon as possible.

Napoleon opened his eyes, not realizing that he’d screwed them shut in the first place, and saw Gaby slumped against her arms, still holding on to the stick. He undid his belt and went for her, but she was already stirring, leaning back against the chair. A cut had opened at her hairline that dripped blood down to her chin in thin trickles.

“Piece of cake,” she said, grinning wildly.

Illya undid himself from his seat and went back into the main belly of the plane, retrieving the briefcase they had lugged along. Inside was a state-of-the-art satellite radio, unreleased to anyone but the military contract from which it had been born. The men he had dispatched were either still unconscious or still dead, depending on how much trouble they’d given him, and he didn’t spare them a second glance as he undid the latch of the briefcase and opened it to reveal a mess of buttons and dials and speakers. He spoke into it for a moment and received a quick answer.

Napoleon helped Gaby stand and climb the control panel. “Coming, Peril?” he called.

“ _Da_. Are we sure nothing was inside the box?”

“Positive,” he replied. “Waverly has a real what-for coming.”

They climbed out onto the nose of the plane and surveyed the wreckage. The old thing had mostly stayed together except for a few sheets of aluminum that were now floating like lily pads in the wake of the crash. The world smelled of salt and steel. They were in the Bay of Biscay, south of the French peninsula, and it wouldn’t take long for British forces to arrive. The agents had reported back to UNCLE that the plane was en-route for London, so the mother organization had surmised the flight path and patrolled the waters between there and Casablanca, waiting for the signal that they had taken the plane and its occupants down. Once Napoleon’s stray bullet had taken out the pilot and the windshield, crippling the aircraft, it had only been a matter of time. It was a slight kink in the plan, but they were used to improvisation. It’s what made them such good assets in the field.

Illya joined them, carrying a folded item Napoleon recognized as an inflatable raft. They all stood together on the nose of the plane for a brief moment, taking in the vast silence of the open ocean, before their combined weight overwhelmed the sinking craft. Then they had to scramble like awkward monkeys up to the roof, shielding their faces of seaspray and minding their grips as the wet metal betrayed them. The plane itself was not huge, only slightly larger than those posh private jets that were always featured in the magazines of beautiful, rich people with more than enough money to waste on that kind of extravagance, and it would not stay afloat for much longer.

The Russian pulled at the air nozzle of the raft and began to blow. Napoleon stood next to him, watching idly with an amused expression on his face. His shoes were getting wet. Then his socks. Then the creeping cold spread up his trousers.

“Please go quicker,” Gaby said to Illya.

“Not to worry. At least we all made it out.”

“Not those guys,” she said, indicating the tail of the plane as it bobbed further and further down into the water. “We’re not saving them, are we?”

“No, not really, no. Not after that scuffle they caused.”

“Bad guys, remember?” Illya said between breaths.

Gaby, being a chop shop girl and not a born-and-bred disciple of the cloak-and-dagger order, had experienced a bit of difficulty in justifying the kind of violence and death that her new role called for, especially in the missions where the answer wasn’t as black and white, as it had been during the Italian affair. Sure, she’d learned to shoot a gun and break a neck, but it wasn’t without protest at least half of the time. Napoleon and Illya had both had to restrain themselves once or twice at their teammate’s request. It was something about which she would have to be spoken to, sooner rather than later. Neither of the agents wanted her off the field team, especially considering the considerable benefits she did bring to their work, but it would get her into trouble one day.

“Bad guys,” she murmured, watching the last glimpse of the sinking plane. They were now foundering in open water, treading at the ocean with shoes and clothes weighing down their bodies.

Napoleon suppressed a shiver and held out one arm, which Gaby clung to like a comical parrot on a pirate’s shoulder. Her fingers squeezed into his bicep.

“все сделано,” said Illya, a little gaspingly, as he brandished the inflated raft. They helped Gaby climb in first, letting her use their shoulders as a stepladder, and then they joined her one after another, dripping wet and cold even under the afternoon sunshine.

The radio, too heavy to carry and therefore lost to the ocean gods, had broadcasted their last position. Hopefully they would not float too far from where the aircraft had sunk to its final resting place.

Napoleon squeezed out seawater from his jacket and clapped his hands together. “We are probably in for a bit of a wait. Who wants to play I Spy?”


	2. Ebb and Flow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unlike with the prologue/first chapter, I've gone with a single narrator for each chapter, so forgive me if there's a moment when you wished you had Illya's insight instead of Napoleon's. I'll get to the others later on.

Napoleon watched as the lightbody aircraft carrier the _HMS Albion_ came to a wavering stop a few yards from their dingy, rising and falling gently in time to the waves. The three agents had watched it appear on the horizon nearly half an hour before, their hands up to shield their eyes from the late afternoon glare on the choppy surface of the water. It was a blessing, really, to have backup in the form of the most powerful navy on earth, and each of them had breathed a silent and private sigh of relief that someone really had come for them. None of them, not even Gaby, Napoleon suspected, would have been surprised to be left out in the ocean to die a secret death, sworn forever in the afterlife as keepers of all their combined knowledge. The CIA, the KGB, MI6, they all dealt in secrets, lies, and fantasies, and it would not be the first time an agent was burned to serve the greater good. But Waverly was fond of them, even Illya, and Napoleon would have been very disappointed indeed if they had wasted away on their little raft, trying to suck down rainwater and hoping the cliffs of the French or Spanish coasts appeared before succumbing to dehydration.

A sailor in a crisp blue uniform helped them onto the plank-and-rope ladder they threw down over the side, a throwback to olden times and stark against the powerful, modern flank of the warship. Napoleon allowed Gaby on first, ever the gentleman, and gestured to Illya before being pushed forward by the grumpy Russian. The first two hours on their raft had passed more or less pleasantly, with the quickly-squashed game of I Spy devolving into a passionate and roundabout conversation about the mission they had failed, or at least delayed in completion. Each of them had their own ideas and theories, the least of which was that they were definitely going to go abroad once more after they cleared medically and psychologically. Gaby and Illya ganged up on Napoleon, telling him he would be the one who alert Waverly to the epic SNAFU of finding the mystery box mysteriously empty, even though it was hardly any more his fault than theirs. The last hour of their temporary marooning was spent in bitter silence when Napoleon managed to push one too many of his teammates’ buttons, Gaby siding with Illya, unsurprisingly he felt, as the two of them seemed a bit more team-within-a-team than was proper for a threesome of agents with the same motivations.

He didn’t feel left out, he reasoned as he scrubbed at his salty hair with a towel that was given to him when he was standing firmly on the deck, but it was exhausting having to go back and forth. Wasn’t Illya supposed to be his partner originally? Didn’t he end up saving both the Russian _and_ the German at some points during their first mission in Rome? Didn’t he deserve a little credit? He was no Russian _wunderkind_ with a kill list and skill sheet as long as his arm, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a decorated and commended officer and agent within the organization. Both of them should be affording him a bit more respect.

They were taken belowdecks almost immediately after boarding the carrier. The engines underfoot rumbled back to life, en route straight back to Portsmouth so that they could find their way into London and rendezvous there with the rest of the UNCLE team.

To their surprise, Alexander Waverly was waiting for them in the infirmary where they were taken, sunburned and thirsty. He blinked at them and congratulated them on a sporting show with the airplane – it would definitely not make headlines that would definitely not attract unwanted attention. Not to mention the fact that they shadowy organization to which the men on board had belonged would immediately suspect foul play. Right on the money, this one.

“Sarcasm does not look good on you, Waverly,” Napoleon said with the usual velvet to his voice, stripping down to his undershirt at the request of the nurse who was poking at him.

“I believe you misread the word ‘discreet’ on the mission brief, Solo,” said Waverly, standing at attention in the corner of the room, unabashedly watching as his agents took off their soggy, crusty clothes and were attended to by medical professionals. “I don’t think we called for you to crash an entire plane into the bay.”

“It was an unavoidable circumstance, old sport.” He threw his boss a callous grin over his shoulder while the nurse, a pretty young thing with a thick headband in her hair, listened to his heartbeat. “You know those times when you just need to take down a whole airplane, can’t be helped.”

“Mm. I suppose I’m going to get all the answers I want later on when you all are debriefed.”

Napoleon did not reply, for once. He snuck a glance at Illya, whose back was to him on another side of the room, and Gaby, who was obediently and quietly following the directions of her own nurse with her eyes down. They would all have to write up their own versions of the incident in case reports before they would be allowed back into the field, and they would have to write them fast, in the next day or so, if they were going to be able to catch up to the trail left behind by the operatives of the mysterious faction which they were chasing. Solo had no problem lying – fudging the truth – about the cause of the crash, since it hadn’t really meant anything in the end. It’s not like they’d lost any valuable information in the crash, and it had given the added bonus of hiding the bodies UNCLE would have normally had to explain away. Illya in particular had the nasty habit of killing more than was necessary, so the men that had gone down with the ship, as it were, had really done them a favor by dying in the watery depths.

His teammates would present a small obstacle, though, if they decided to tell exactly what happened. It had been a freak accident, a one-in-a-hundred shot that Napoleon knew, in his heart-of-hearts, he should not have taken, and his teammates knew it too. Firing a gun in a pressurized, thin-bodied aircraft at cruising altitude could have killed them all, not just the bad guys. Suddenly he understood their sourness on the raft, and he managed to feel just a bit of shame.

“Anyone?” Waverly said to the quiet, cold air in the medical bay. “Care to enlighten me?”

“It was one of the men. They shot at us and hit the pilot. Smashed the windshield.”

Napoleon widened his eyes at the floor, leaning forward as he sat on the stretcher so the nurse could listen to his breathing. She must have been aware of his heartbeat speeding up.

“I took control of the plane after and got it down to a safe altitude while they took care of the men and the lockbox. The debris took out one of the engines, so it was hard to control. At that point the damage was catastrophic, and our only choice was to hope for a safe crash.”

Gaby too. Napoleon licked his lips and waited.

Waverly seemed to consider this. It was obvious that he’d first assumed the crash was their screw-up, but with Illya _and_ Gaby, whom he likened to an adopted daughter of sorts, giving him the same story, he would have to reconsider. At least, that was what Napoleon himself assumed. He could be just as good at detecting their bullshit as he had been back in Rome.

Then: “Fine. A blunder, but an unavoidable one. When you’re cleared down here, meet me in the captain’s conference room. A sailor will show you where.” He left them with their nurses.

Napoleon wanted to be alone with his teammates, to thank them for their loyalty and offer them a rare, genuine apology. They needn’t have lied – he wouldn’t have held it against them if they’d told the truth and continued on with the mission alone while he got some residual training pounded into him back at Langley. He could hear his training officers now: ‘Shot a gun at altitude?! What are you, a dip stick?!’

The nurses in the room completed their checkups on the agents and began to write some notes, recording everything for their personnel files, while they dressed in unisex, rough-spun jumpsuits that were the only other clothes they had available to them at that point. They couldn’t leave yet, though, so while the nurses scratched out their preliminary findings, the three of them drifted together almost naturally, standing in an orderly row beside the nearest stretcher in the cramped medical bay. Napoleon passed the others an almost shy look of gratitude underneath his long lashes, trying for the docility he knew they weren’t expecting. When Illya’s face remained unchanged and Gaby’s twisted in a smirk, he knew the message had been received.

The door opened, making them turn their heads in unison. In walked a very beautiful woman in a trim white blouse and skirt. She was blonde and curly-haired, her small ringlets piled high on her head like a beehive. She had cat-eye glasses perched on a prim nose and beestung lips that curved down in a frown when she first looked at the three of them. “Three IVs of saline, please, nurse,” she said to the nearest one, her voice low and silky and immediately obeyed. She had a twinge of an accent.

“Hello, Cecily,” Napoleon said smoothly.

“Hello, _cher_ ,” she replied, swooping her gaze over the tops of her glasses and making his belly warm. She had a piercing, suggestive way about her eyes. To the others, she said, “My name is Dr. Franke. I’ve been assigned to UNCLE as medical officer and caregiver.”

Gaby nodded and murmured a hello. Her voice was even more gravelly than usual, a sure sign of fatigue that the others had learned to read early on.

The nurses came over and busied themselves with hanging heavy glass bulbs of clear liquid feeding into long, thin silicone tubes, bustling around the three agents and the doctor with practiced efficiency. Dr. Franke flipped through the pages of notes that the nurses had prepared, ignoring them for the time being. Napoleon, not used to being ignored, especially by a woman, crossed his arms in front of his chest and uncrossed them again when the nurse assigned to him pulled his arm away and rolled his sleeve up to the crook of his elbow, limiting the stern effect he’d been trying for. “When did you join up, Cecily? I hadn’t heard of your, well, promotion.”

She smiled knowingly at him and did not comment on his informal use of her first name. “I’ve been working for UNCLE longer than you have, Napoleon, I just didn’t know it at first. Mr. Waverly and I met in Paris around the same time I met you, and we stayed friends over the years. When the organization became official, I slid right on over from _le Service_.”

He hadn’t heard any of this, arousing his suspicions. He’d first met this very young, very eager medical student during the War, and they’d enjoyed a brief but passionate fling right before he was fingered for several of his side projects and taken up by the federal government. It surprised him that he hadn’t heard from her since those muddy days in France, especially if they were working for the same people, more or less.

“All of you seem healthy enough,” she said, flipping once more through her papers. “I’m going to recommend rest for twenty-four hours before you can resume active duty, after you each get a course of fluids.”

Napoleon twitched his arm when the needle slicked through his skin and into his bloodstream. It was cold and uncomfortable. Beside him, Gaby and Illya had similar, muted reactions.

“Try not to fall out of any more airplanes, for the time being,” the doctor smiled. “I’ll be back in half an hour to release you.”

She left; the nurses followed behind after asking if they needed anything else and being given negative answers all around. The medical bay was left cold and still.

“Well,” said Napoleon, sliding gracefully up onto the stretcher so that he could stretch luxuriously with his untapped arm. “This has been a whole day of surprises.”

“Is she trustworthy?” Illya asked.

“I trusted her with intimacy, but then again we didn’t share any issues of international security at that point.” Napoleon regarded his partner with one quirked eyebrow. He was impressed that Peril had picked up on his raised hackles when Cecily had come into the room. It marked a shift in their working relationship, even then, even after several missions of life-and-death. Illya relied on his instincts, which also meant relying on Solo’s. It was touching, in a super spy kind of way.

“For once, I’d like to have a mission where your love life does not interfere with our work,” Gaby said crossly, fingering the injection site on her arm.

“Istanbul was hardly an interference-”

“What are we going to tell Waverly about the box?” Illya asked, interrupting Napoleon’s protest. “Are you sure it was empty?”

“Peril, for the hundredth, and dare I say it, last time, yes, it was empty. At this point you’re just going to have to trust me.”

“Trust you more than the intelligence officers in London?” Gaby said without rancor. “It feels odd that we went in with such misinformation.”

“Odd, but it does happen,” the American sighed. “Espionage is not an exact science like car machinery.”

Gaby wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t sensitive about her past because it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, but lately they had noticed she was eager to move forward from her days as a chop shop girl. She was a full-fledged agent, and it had been her prerogative to prove herself, especially in front of them. “Well, it didn’t help us much, risking our lives for absolutely nothing.”

“Oh, it wasn’t nothing,” Napoleon said, striding away from them with a grand air, detracted slightly by the IV pole squeaking along behind him on small rubber wheels. “It tells us that there is definitely something to hide.”

“Why transport an empty box with armed men in the first place?” Illya said, continuing in this vein. “What did they have to hide to distract us like this?”

“Exactly,” Napoleon said, pointing to him like a schoolteacher at a student who had gotten an answer right. “It means they’re on to us.”

“And who is they?” Gaby said, pessimistic. “We don’t even know.”

“No, but they don’t know that.”

“What?”

“They don’t know that we don’t know. They are going to panic, speed up, make a mistake. All we have to do is be there behind them to catch it.”

With this assumption, and the vigor and excitement that came from the idea that they were back on track, the three agents walked into the captain’s private conference room on a deck higher up half an hour later with a renewed energy to their steps. The IV fluids had replaced the electrolytes they’d lost from the ordeal, and Dr. Franke had released them with clean bills of health all around. They were ready to get back on the horse.

Waverly greeted them somberly, sitting at the head of a long, rectangular table and shuffling around numerous sheets of printer paper and facsimile copies. Behind him, the traditional debriefing set-up of pinned photographs, newspaper clippings, and stolen reports from various other encounters with the criminal element hung on the sheet metal walls. It looked like the main room from UNCLE HQ had been picked up and airlifted to the _Albion_.

“Sit down,” he said to the agents. “We have quite some work to do, it seems.”

“So,” said Napoleon, grandstanding his bad news with an easy, nonchalant air. “The box was empty.”

Waverly looked up at him over the top of the papers he was holding.

“Bare. Unfilled. Hollow. Vacant.”

Illya kicked him under the table.

“Unoccupied.” He ducked a swing from Illya’s fist.

“That is bad news,” Waverly clucked.

“Not so. We surmised a good alternate theory.” Napoleon told him about what they’d discussed in the medical bay with his teammates chiming in when needed. “All you need to do is send out your three best agents and have them uncover everything we haven’t learned yet. Then we can clear this whole mess in a jiffy.”

“Right, well.” Waverly stood up and pointed to a familiar photograph, one they had all studied before leaving for the trip to Morocco. “We’ve been busy while you three have been playing ace pilots. So this man, Amine Haik, you all know. He is the leader of a little resistance outfit we monitored during Morocco’s independence. He is the one who has seemed to get a little antsy lately.” He moved to the next photograph, this one depicting a grainy shot of several men in gandoras, long, loose garments designed to be cool in desert environments. “These are all the various figureheads for several of the local and international resistance movements associated with anti-democratic, anti-capitalist organ izations.”

Napoleon glanced sideways at Illya. Those were codewords for Communist. The Russian did not react, even though he would have been aware of Napoleon’s gaze.

“There is a worrying amount of fascist sympathizers growing in the area around North Africa and the Mediterranean gulf. Several of these men seem to be throwing aside theological ideals and allying themselves with members of opposite creeds and customs.” He pointed to a new photograph, this one fresh with better lighting and sharper detail, showing men of all manners of colors and dress, eating dinner at what looked like a fancy establishment. “Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Algeria, the Netherlands, these are a few of the countries represented in this new faction by members who seem to all agree on one thing: down with capitalism. We’ve had our intelligence and field agents at work for some time tracking a few of the more notable heads, and we’ve just about tied several of them together. Amine Haik, Nicolau Neto, Cristoforo Lupino: some of the biggest names in business and entrepreneurship in the western world seem to have a devious underside to their dealings. Communist sympathizers, to the one, and all with experience in some sort of illegal activity. Lupino, he ran guns for Mussolini under the cover of Milanese fashion. Neto experimented with propaganda and a revolution that false-started once Hitler swallowed his gun. But Haik, whose men you were following yesterday and this morning…” Waverly went to one more new photograph, pointing his finger directly into the cheek of a close-up shot of a pudgy man with a thick mustache under piggy eyes. “This is Galel Tawfeek. He is a damn good microbiologist and epidemiologist, educated in the UK and the US. Originally from Marrakech. One of the fathers of weaponized anthrax and tularemia.”

“Let me guess,” started Napoleon, sounding weary.

“We’ve lost track of him.”

Napoleon rolled his neck and rubbed his eyes. Beside him, Illya leaned forward, the grumble in his chest starting low and breaking in his throat.

“Did you send us on that airplane looking for deadly disease?”

Waverly shook his head, looking unperturbed at the Russian’s insinuation. “Just for documents detailing the disease. We have not yet heard that Tawfeek and his crew have managed to make anything. Just that they’re trying. That plane should have been carrying a lockbox full of Tawfeek’s work, being transported to him in London.”

That got their attention. Until then, most of their work had been in foreign countries, to which none of them had any emotional or filial ties. London, England was uncomfortably close to home.

“This mad scientist is in London?” asked Gaby. “And you let him come?”

“He has citizenship and no misdeeds of his own. He was an ally in the war.”

“So what makes you think he is with Haik?” Illya asked.

“Because they were spotted together last year, right before that outbreak of hantavirus in Fes. At that point, Haik was not yet public enemy number one on anybody’s list – that was topped by Vinciguerra,” he said, nodding at them appreciatively. “It was noted and pushed aside, for the time being.”

“And now he’s probably in the process of making a superbug that can kill anyone who does not align with the Communist way.” Napoleon shook his head, disbelieving that the world could be so threatened so fast once again.

“That is the thread of the narrative so far, yes.” Waverly looked at them almost sympathetically. “When we sent you in, we thought there would be much more to gain and not so much to lose. Unfortunately, what you came up with seems to be correct: they’re one step ahead of us at this point.”

“So we have some new names, so what? What are we going to do to stop the process?”

Waverly went to a map pinned underneath a few other papers that Napoleon recognized as depicting the greater London area. There were a few red pushpins marking off a few spots both north and south of the Thames. “These are a few of the places we think Haik might have hidden Tawfeek. They’re all medical offices with laboratories and the equipment we’re told would be necessary to manufacture something on the scale we are talking about. You are going to lead some raids after some careful – I’ll repeat, _careful_ – surveillance.”

“Excellent,” Napoleon said. “Do we have covers?”

“Solo, you are going to be Denny Cabirne, a journalist with an interest in the study of disease. You’re doing an exposé on viruses. Teller, you’ll be his photographer, Cara Ackerman. We have IDs freshly printed up for you and have already made appointments to tour each and every one. You will need to document as much as you can. You know the drill, get lost for an hour or two, wandering around the back halls they deliberately avoid.”

“And me?”

“Kuryakin, unfortunately, from your personnel record we are aware that you cannot feign a British accent as well as we would need, and a Russian would feel very out of place in an operation like this. You are going to offer backup to these two, staying in radio and visual contact as much as possible. Does that sound reasonable?”

After a moment, he nodded, though something had darkened behind his eyes that only the others would notice.

“Good. We’ll be dropping you off in Westminster tonight. I’ll have packets of the mission details brought to your bunks for you to go over before the plane takes off upstairs at 1800. Good luck.”

They were dismissed, so they went outside into the cramped hall, where a sailor was waiting to lead them to their bunks for a momentary rest. They did not have the clearance to speak with the young man ahead of them, so they had to wait until they were in the four-bed sleeping quarters with the door firmly shut before they could chat.

“Right mess, this is, ay?” Napoleon said, laying back against the wall on one of the lower bunks, putting on an obnoxious cockney lilt to his voice. In reality, he could do a near-perfect Received Pronunciation English accent, sounding exactly like those posh broadcasters on radio and television.

“This is not going to be fun,” Gaby said, sitting on the opposite bunk. “I was hoping for more guns or car chases or something. Not diseases that could kill us in our sleep.”

“As to how fun it’s going to be, that’s easy. We make it fun. No gun fights? We’ll start one. No car chases? Those are a pain in the ass in London anyway. As for the diseases, we just have to be careful. Right, Peril? Care-full.”

Illya sat down on the bunk near Gaby. “Since it is you who is going to be inside the laboratory, I should think you should be more careful, Cowboy.”

The inclusion of the nickname relaxed Napoleon; it meant Illya was not holding a grudge. He sat up and grinned at his teammates. “I don’t know about you two, but I haven’t seen London in a long time, and we haven’t done true undercover work in a long time. Those two together are a magical combination.”

“Whatever you say, Solo,” Gaby said, lying back against the bunk and hooking her arm over her eyes. “Wake me when it’s time to go.”

Illya made brief eye contact with Napoleon and then climbed up to the top, spreading out his considerable bulk evenly across the thin mattress. Napoleon followed suit, mashing the cardboard-thin pillow beneath his head and staring up at the metal sheet of the bunk above him. He knew he wouldn’t sleep, but he would try. He had a feeling it would be the last good rest he’d have for some time.


	3. Rising Tide

Gaby watched as the deck of the small carrier swooped away beneath them through the tiny windows on both sides. She and the other two agents were cramped into a long row of little ducks behind the pilot of the thin, fast jet that would get them to Northolt Royal Air Base, just outside London. She had on an uncomfortable helmet and headset combination that was pinching her ears, but she could hear Illya’s groan through the electronic connection as solid ground fell away beneath the small tires of the jet, and they were once more locked in the fierce grip of thin air.

She hadn’t slept a wink; as she’d lain there on the uncomfortable mattress, she’d listened half-heartedly to Illya and Solo mutter and theorize on and on, an endless string of conspiracy and overthought. She’d long ago proven herself as a reliable spy and a hard worker for the cause of domestic safety, but she didn’t have the natural stomach for it the way the other two had. She did not consume spy novels on her down time. She did not wear the solitary, lonely life as a badge of honor. She often wondered, very privately and in her darkest moments, if they looked down at her for that.

The flight to the air base was thankfully short, the drive into central London even shorter. She and Solo were provided with a trunk each, containing clothes and gear for the assignment. She was delighted to find that her outfits were comfortable and winter-appropriate, as it was late November and the air in England was much crisper than it had been in Morocco. As much as she liked playing dress up like some little girl’s doll, she also liked it when her missions put her into fashions that were taken seriously. As Cara Ackerman, she was going to be wearing blouse-and-pants combos in warm wool and figure-hugging cuts – that part, at least, was always in her favor. She had a good figure, and she would be damned if she wasn’t allowed to show it off. Solo, sitting in the black cab beside her, was tinkering with the gadgets they’d been assigned. Her camera was a regular old thing, but his glasses would also be taking pictures from the tiny lens in the frame, so that they could record the places in the labs where the workers didn’t allow photos. His pen, stuffed dutifully into the breast pocket of his blazer, would act as a tiny chemical sniffer, recording molecules less than one part per million in the air. Later, after they had cleared from the laboratory, scientists of their own would analyze the data and possibly figure out exactly what they were doing, especially in the back rooms when Gaby and Solo inevitably got themselves lost like the bumbling reporters they were.

Illya was left behind to wait for his own cab to his own home base. Gaby and Solo were given two small flats in the same building, requisitioned for this exact purpose of giving undercover agents real places to stay, in case someone followed them back. The bad guys would not see these supposed reporters retreating to hotel rooms, but instead to actual apartments where it seemed like they had lived for a while. It was an appropriate and exciting opportunity for Gaby to settle down somewhere, at least for the few days that this mission lasted. It felt like she hadn’t had a place of her own since she’d left Germany.

When she was settled into the tiny flat – UNCLE was an organization of finite resources, after all, and real estate space in London was harder to come by than most black market goods – she put on a stylish, warm trenchcoat over a dress and tights in mod colors, grabbed a small clutch, and went out into the wet, dirty winter air of London.

She didn’t know this city very well, having only learned about it from afar when Waverly had come calling to her little mechanic shop in East Berlin, so she spent an hour or two wandering on the rain-slicked sidewalks, enchanted by the hustle and bustle of one of the world’s most famous cities. Black cabs and red buses and silver sports cars rumbled down the carriageways and back alleys, all with destinations in mind and the determination to get there faster than everyone else. If there was one thing she could say about the Soviets, it was that they kept chaos out of the streets, at least in the public’s view.

She found a pub and warmed herself with a tall pint of thick, dark lager, eyeing the young gentlemen in the booths surrounding the floor space. There was a mirror lining the shelves behind the bar, and she could see the goings-on of the action as the young bucks sized themselves up against one another, snorting and tossing their heads to see who would be the one to approach her on her stool first.

A shadow fell over her face. She looked up and narrowed her eyes a bit at the man who had decided to upstage the college club in the booths. He was big in a slightly unpleasant way, and he had the weak chin and girlish mouth of the British upper crust. She thanked her lucky stars that she was born a German peasant girl; she might have been intertwined in the debutante’s catalogue and forced to marry this foppish fellow just by virtue of her birth and station alone if she’d been British. And upper class.

“You’re all alone,” he said by way of preamble, meaning there was none. The statement was not a threat, but it felt like one, vaguely menacing and deliberately bringing awareness to her vulnerable solitude.

“That I am,” she said, adopting her own English accent. She was almost as good as Solo at feigning the round tones of the British, and she looked forward in a playful sort of way to debuting it the next day with him, just to see the surprise on his face.

“Well, let me remedy that at once,” the man said. He smiled and sat on the stool next to her, bringing with him a sickly perfume of spice and roses. “My name is Bradley.”

“Cara,” she said, saying it like _carr-uh_ , which sounded more elitist than the other way. She took his proffered hand in a shake and didn’t wince when he demonstrated his supposed virility with an antagonizing squeeze against her finger bones. She was not impressed, and would not have been even if she wasn’t working. The only brutish strength she liked was the kind that was not directed against her, but for her.

“What are you doing out tonight, Cara?”

“Shopping,” she said easily, taking another drink from her beer. It was half empty, a lucky break for her. When it was finished she would excuse herself.

Bradley looked around at the floor around her stool, then returned his gaze to her face. “Not so lucky tonight, are you?” His smile was predatory.

The eeriness of this statement put a drop of ice water in her belly, but she suppressed it with a wan smile, hoping to let him know the pickup was not going well in the near-universal body language of mating rituals. “Actually, I was. I already dropped the bags off with my body man and nipped in here for a quick drink before bed.”

The reference to bed was a mistake, she saw immediately. The hunger in his eyes flickered and grew. She looked away and took another sip to hide the quiver of a sneer on her upper lip.

“A body man, hmm? That must be nice, having someone to order around and do exactly as you bid whenever you want.”

“It is.”

Her obvious disinterest did not seem to deter him. He hunched a little bit further on the stool, showing off the girth of his shoulders. The bartender had come and gone twice in the conversation, trying to see what Bradley wanted to order, but the man had ignored the little mustachioed fellow both times in favor of staring at Gaby’s face. She could see him drinking in the details of her features, the curve of her jaw, the long muscles of her neck, the hollow of her throat, and beyond. She willed herself not to throw a punch or, more satisfyingly, a knee. He was just a jerk, nothing more.

The door to the bar opened and shut, bringing a brief swirl of cold air into the fireplace-warmed atmosphere inside. Off-hand, she glanced over to see the new arrival, just as she had every other time the door had been pushed open since she’d been there. It was half agent training and half plain awareness, but it was always useful. The new arrival this time, for example, would be greatly beneficial to her current predicament.

She made eye contact with Illya and beckoned him with the tiniest of nods. He responded with a dark, questioning glare at Bradley’s back as he strode over with his impossibly long legs, which she took a fraction of a moment to consider before shaking her head as she slid her gaze back over to the man beside her.

“Ah, Wentworth,” she said, putting her hand on Illya’s arm as he came up directly behind Bradley. She’d told him not to make a scene with the tiny headshake, but obviously he couldn’t resist a good old fashioned Russian scare tactic. “Bradley, this is my body man. He’s come to retrieve me. I believe it’s time for me to go.”

The British man swiveled in his stool and made a cartoonish glance upward, the movement consuming his entire upper body as he finally made it to Illya’s face. “My, you’re a rather large one, aren’t you?”

Illya opened his mouth to reply, something smoldering in his gaze, but Gaby interrupted him, standing up quickly and getting one of her heels caught in the rung on her own stool. The jerky movement she had to make to regain her balance made them both turn their attention to her as she laughed airily and swept her hair behind her shoulders. “Oh, Wentworth is just a darling little thing,” she said, finding herself falling deeper and deeper into that mythic, Eliza Doolittle-esque example of a proper Englishborn lady.

“You aren’t truly going?” Bradley said, making to stand up as well, but Illya was in the way, looming and dark.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Perhaps I’ll find you in here again another time.” She managed a wink at him, making him positively shiver with lust, and turned away from the bar, Illya in her wake.

When they stepped back out into the dark of the London winter, Gaby sighed and turned her collar up against the wind. “It’s a shame,” she said, back in her throaty German. “I actually liked that pub. Now I’ll have to find another one.”

Illya slipped his arm around her shoulders as they walked down the sidewalk. “Too English,” he said. “I’m sure we can find a nice Eastern European importer with Zhigulevskoye. Real Russian beer.”

“You can take your Soviet pisswater and pour it down your Red gullet, but I will take Allied beer any time,” she said, only half-joking. It wasn’t often, and it was rarer and rarer as their partnership in this situation continued, but sometimes she had to remind herself that he was a byproduct of the country and regime that had killed her parents and driven her country and kinsfolk to ruin. The Soviets were definitely not her favorite people in the world.

“What were you doing there, anyway?” he asked. It had begun to drizzle, and he hunched closer over her, as if he could shelter her from the rain with just his bulk.

She had responded in kind, pressing her side into his, leaning into his touch. It was only because of the rain, she told herself. “Having a drink,” she replied. “What else would I be doing?”

This he did not answer, and she wanted to leave it be, but perhaps the beer in her belly was emboldening her, just as it had that first night together in the hotel in Rome, when she had wanted to test the cut of his sails and see what he was made of. She had been drunk, sure, but she’d known what she was doing.

“What?” she continued, challenging. “You were obviously following me. Did you want to find me in some English slug’s arms just so you could beat him up?”

“I do not trust the English men, especially in bars. You are small and alone.”

“How noble of you, Illya,” she said, using his name, a rarity for the three of them to do.

“If you would stay in the flat and keep yourself out of harm’s way, I would not have to do this.”

“If you would stop following me every step I took, you would not have to, you know, follow.”

“You are the one who still wears it,” he grunted. He seemed unsure why they were sniping at each other but unwilling to let it dissolve into a full-blown scuffle, seeing as they were still walking down fairly busy London streets.

Gaby brought her hand up to finger the pearl pendant around her neck. It had started as the fake engagement ring she’d worn while they were undercover and betrothed, then once the mission was over and it was revealed to be the complex location tracker and sound recorder he’d used to keep an eye on her every move, it became a necklace, worn for sentimental reasons more than anything. She didn’t believe he kept track of her when they were not on duty together. At least, not all the time. He _was_ protective and possessive, that much she knew, but they each had lives outside of the trio partnership, and she’d gone on to other things outside of the work with UNCLE. But when they were on duty, they were in near constant danger, and she kept the necklace, and he kept the machines it was tied to. That didn’t mean she wanted him following her every move on the street.

“I am not yours to protect, you know,” she said suddenly, surprising herself.

He waited a threebeat before muttering, “I know.”

“I could have handled that on my own.”

There was a smile in his voice this time. “I know.”

“You’d better know,” she muttered. She shrugged out from under his arm, pulling her coat tighter around herself. The sudden absence of his body heat was chillier than she’d been expecting, like pulling on cold socks.

He shoved his big hands into his coat pocket, his neck turtled against his high collar. In the street darkness, his face was in shadow. People coming at them down the sidewalk were giving him wary looks and making wide paths around them as they walked.

“You do a good accent,” he said after a few minutes of them in silence, listening to the hiss of car tires on the wet asphalt.

“Thank you.”

That was the last they said for the rest of the walk, side-by-side, occasionally bumping elbows, until they got to the building that served as her home base. Illya saw her to the front door and pointed across the street.

“I am in a storage room, facing both of your windows. If there is trouble, flash the lights or break the glass. I will come.”

She felt sorry for him then. It wasn’t fair that his accommodations were so much poorer than theirs, but she supposed that had to do with him being Russian in an English and American unit. His handlers in the KGB had much less authority than their own respective ones in MI6 and the CIA, even though this was still supposed to be some sort of international peacekeeping liaison, meant to supersede borders and alliances and past hurt feelings.

“Good night,” he said. He was looking at her with that same expression she remembered from Rome, when he’d thought they were sending her into the lion’s pit.

“Good night,” she replied, turning away and going through the door.

When she was back in her own flat, the door locked behind her and her shoes kicked off right where she wanted them, she went to the far window without turning on the lights. Across the street, rows and rows of anonymous, identical windows stared back at her, all dark. Illya was behind one of them, probably looking at her just as she was doing. Feeling foolish, she pulled the curtains and went to bed.

The next morning, she was up very soon after dawn’s first light. The day was going to be dreary and seasonably cold, she saw from the cloud cover as she bustled over her kitchenette. The apartment had come fully stocked with groceries and kitchen utensils, and she delighted herself in making a full English breakfast, simmering a thick cut of ham and two fresh eggs in the pan while buttering toast and cutting cherry tomatoes. She didn’t like baked beans, but she was considering adding those just to feel as authentic as possible when the doorbell buzzed.

She had a small revolver in her purse, hanging by its strap over the back of one vinyl dining chair. She answered the door with the gun in her left hand, pointed out at the person behind, ready to splinter through the plywood if need be.

It was Solo, looking fresh and proper. He had on a nerdy bowtie and thick horn-rimmed glasses which could not hide the brilliance of his blue eyes. He pushed into her apartment and sniffed appreciatively. “Smells good.”

“I only made enough for one,” she said.

“Then I’ll just go hungry.” He sat at her table and pulled a handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket, wiping at invisible smears on his glasses. He appraised her plate when she set it in front of the other chair on the small Formica table before going to retrieve a tall glass of cold cow’s milk. As always, it felt good to be out of East Berlin. “You’ve forgotten the beans.”

“I don’t like them.” She sat down and began to eat voraciously, hoping to disgust him with bad table manners.

He took a sip of her milk, looking as unconcerned as she had ever seen him. “The first appointment for a laboratory tour is in an hour.”

“We won’t be late.”

“You don’t have much experience with London traffic. The last thing we want to do is show up late and give a bad first impression. We’re journalists, our job is more important than full bellies.”

“ _I_ am a German girl who learned to respect a full plate of food in front of me. We ate what we were given, when it was given, which wasn’t often.”

“No wonder you’re so small,” he mused. “I also wonder where that went when I was cooking you dinner.”

“I said plate of food, not plate of manure. And why does everyone keep saying that,” she muttered under her breath, washing down a big, sloppy bite of dripping egg yolk on crunchy, buttery toast with the last sip of milk. She pushed the plate away, leaving one slice of toast soaking in runny yolk and a few bites of the ham slab. “Here, scavenger, have it then.”

“Gladly,” he said, taking up her fork.

She dressed in the bedroom, fixing her hair into a fashionable half-up pouf and letting the ends curl like Mary Tyler Moore. Warm corduroy pants and a plaid wool sweater completed the ensemble. She looked like she could be on the cover of Vogue. Solo whistled when she came back out.

“England suits you. Perhaps you should move here.”

Gaby was in a good mood from the good food and the good clothes and the good anticipation of a mission in front of them. She grabbed her purse and the heavy camera she’d been assigned before leading them out the door. “The whole world suits me, darling,” she said in her Eliza Doolittle, catching Solo’s startled look in a hall mirror and thinking that being kidnapped, tied up, shot at, and blown up out of the sky were all worth it just for that moment.

The first three laboratories they toured were ordinary in that they were sterile, quiet, and boring. Cara Ackerman and Denny Cabirne asked all the right questions, took pictures, got interviews, and went home disappointed each time. Two days passed with relatively little commotion, though Solo caused a stir when he broke off from her that first night and was almost late the next morning. She’d had to break into his flat and hurry him out the door, shooing away the hungover girl in his bed. Gaby would make sure to mention this to Illya when she saw him again. It would give them more ammunition in case they ever needed some against their American partner. He was a good, near-infallible agent, but everyone made mistakes, and his happened to be blonde.

Solo and Gaby did good work together, though, despite any differences in morality or priority. They worked off each other well, fueled by their play-acting as hard-nosed reporters, and Gaby found herself enjoying the nosy work of asking questions and expecting answers in return. The scientists in the lab, too, seemed to like talking about themselves and their work, and the two agents had to struggle through monologues espousing isotopes and genetic strains and chemical baths, trying to appear interested and as if they understood. Gaby found herself learning a bit more than she’d expected; once or twice, early on in the first tour, she’d asked what came off as elementary questions, trying to connect the dots between the work and the medical, scientific jargon. By the third tour, at a different lab, she was practically a pro.

The two of them broke for lunch together at a Thai place in Islington, comparing notes. UNCLE desk agents came to them and surreptitiously passed them a briefcase of notes, swapping it for the one with the morning’s film from Gaby’s camera and the chemical sniffer pen from Solo’s jacket, following the routine from each of the other labs. Solo read through the briefs and noted out loud that no progress had been made so far in identifying either Haik or Tawfeek or any of their associates.

They prepared themselves for the fourth tour, the last one of this second day of spying. Gaby replaced the film in her camera, getting better at it, while Solo put the newest chemical sniffer pen in his jacket pocket and adjusted his glasses. They plotted in the back of the black cab that was taking them to the lab, all the way back in Hammersmith.

“I want to get lost this time,” she said. “If we are really taking turns, then it’s my turn now.”

“You do realize you’re going to be walking into rooms of germs that could likely kill you in days if we are at the right place.”

This did give her some pause, but not enough to be deterred. So far, either they’d gotten lost together or he had gone off on his own, and she’d provided enough distraction for him to take pictures with his glasses as he navigated through twists and turns of empty, clean hallways. She wanted to go off alone too.

“I’ll be careful, like we’ve been the past three times we’ve done this. I’m getting bored.”

“Don’t let Waverly hear you say that.”

“I can say whatever I like. I want to find the bad guys and win and go…” Her voice trailed off.

She didn’t really have a home. She hadn’t really ever had one, since her adoptive parents had died. After Istanbul, she’d gone back to Germany and settled in a temporary flat in Düsseldorf, but she’d been uprooted from there only a few weeks later for that fiasco in Peru. Returning to Germany hadn’t been an option right away, and the three of them had had to lay low in San Diego, Illya especially who lived for an uncomfortable week in the attic of a pleasantly sweet old woman. Then, once she’d been able to fly back to Europe, she’d discovered her little flat had been taken, her few boxes of worldly goods shipped to UNCLE headquarters, and her partners to the wind, at least for a few weeks until they’d had to come together again. Gaby had found herself bouncing aimlessly from hotel to hostel to hotel to flat and back to hotels ever since these damnable men had first invaded her quaint, quiet little mechanic’s shop.

“I just want to do it,” she recovered.

Solo shook his head, but said, “Fine. But you can’t blame me if you come down with smallpox.”

They arrived at the lab and stepped out from the cab, regarding its cool, brutalist lines and heavy footprint with square concrete walls and frameless windows with a little bit of unease. Solo leaned over to Gaby and muttered, “If any laboratory is concocting world-ending superbugs, this would be the place,” echoing her own thoughts exactly.

Her eye caught a bit of movement further down the thin, one-way street as they ascended the front steps to the door. Illya had arrived, coming out of his own cab and lurking in the alleyway a block down. She turned her face away from his lone figure and smiled at the receptionist in the front lobby, a surprisingly young blonde with curls that harkened back to Shirley Temple. They told her their names and their business and expected to wait in the armchairs that echoed the same straight, rigid lines of the building, but a man appeared almost instantly and beckoned them down through some double doors into a hallway, introducing himself as Hawkins.

“We can’t tell you what a delight it is to have some interest in our work,” he said. He was thin and stooped, with watery eyes and the nervous energy of a monkey. His balding head was large and domed, and Gaby had to fight hard against the instinct to offer him a banana.

“We’re glad our readership is interested. Science like this is going to be the wave of the future,” said Solo in his clipped accent, sounding like he would be more at home reading from papers in a televised account of world news.

Gaby raised her camera. “Do you mind if we got a picture of you? That framed photo behind you would make an excellent backdrop.” She pointed to a picture, one of several in a line down the wall of the hallway, that depicted several men standing in front of the same building they were in, looking young and wearing post-war era fashion. Hawkins blushed and stammered but stood for the photo, smiling awkwardly and sweating. Gaby flattered him with encouragement behind the camera, pretending to take several shots, each one closer and closer, until their guide wasn’t even in the picture anymore; she wanted a close-up of the framed photo.

When Hawkins recovered and wiped his shining forehead with a kerchief, continuing the tour, Gaby caught Solo’s eye and indicated the photo. He examined it, and she saw the triumphant gleam in his baby blues.

“This way, this way,” bustled Hawkins. He launched into a spiel about the work they were doing, identifying new viruses and their potential for research. “Viruses, you see, are incurable. We can fight them, attempt to prevent them, but once you have a virus, even one as simple as the common cold, you are stuck with it until your body’s natural defenses has shunted it out. And then the whole process repeats the next year, if you’re on a seasonal schedule like many people.”

Their work, he said, was trying to find that magical panacea. Vaccines were revolutionary in the prevention of viral infections such as polio and measles, but people were still dying of these diseases that humanity needed to wrap up, much like it had with bacteria which were vanquished with antibiotics, god rest Alexander Fleming’s soul. Scientists were working themselves to the bone all over the world trying to be the one who would get their name immortalized, win that Nobel prize, and save humanity.

Gaby listened, and learned, but her heart was beating in her throat, because that photograph she had spotted showed Amine Haik and Galel Tawfeek standing side-by-side, staring down the camera with piggy, murderous eyes.


	4. Whirlpool

Camped out outside, with rain once again trickling down the collar of his jacket, Illya checked his father’s watch for the time. The two agents had been inside for almost an hour. Normally that wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary – the last lab they reconned had taken nearly two – but this building was looming, ugly, and intimidating, and he had a bad feeling in his gut. He didn’t have a concrete reason why, but he trusted it. There were signs he was slowly putting together as Gaby and Solo toured inside.

For one thing, he had observed three different men coming and going through the back door of the building, carrying packages or folders. Each of them were on foot until they caught a taxi roaming down the major connecting streets further up their little avenue, and each, as far as he’d been able to observe from his crow’s nest atop a row of townhomes opposite the laboratory, had gone a different way. He supposed they could be innocent delivery boys exchanging medical supplies or information, but as an agent, he saw suspicion and malpractice in everything.

 For another, this lab had been especially eager when undercover UNCLE agents had called to inquire about a possible tour and interview with the director of operations. Illya had read the notes on all of the places they were going to in their search for the rogue scientists, and this lab had jumped at the chance to have people come in, potentially disrupting a normal day of operations, the two reporters serving as a nuisance who asked too many questions and dug too deep. The other places had been hesitant, only agreeing when the undercover agents had done a little bit of strong-arming to force the issue. The inside scoop would be given one way or another, they had reasoned, and this way the general public would be informed rather than muckraked. The lone place that had agreed readily, even welcomingly, stood out, and anything that stood out was some sort of clue or issue.

Activity at the front door caught his attention. The glass and steel swung open rather suddenly, and Gaby and Solo were shunted out with less than polite force. The two of them were shouting. Solo was shaking a fist, his glasses askew, and they regained their footing at the base of the stoop. Illya found himself on his feet, about to reveal himself, when Solo seemed to sense this and put up a hand behind his back, giving a “back down” signal that was universal in its meaning.

His partners exchanged a few more words with the men who were standing in the double doors, blocking any reentrance, and then turned away huffily, adjusting their clothing. They walked down the sidewalk shoulder-to-shoulder, muttering and probably plotting. He gathered what few things he had with him for the long wait of surveillance and high-tailed it down to the street, catching them turn down a new road just in time to follow.

After an appropriate amount of time from the abrupt exit of the lab, he watched them enter a coffee shop after they strode up to a commercial strip of stores and businesses, anonymous in the crowd of shoppers and businessmen. He waited a few minutes, casting his gaze up and down the busy street, waiting to see if someone else was following. Then he entered as well, glad for the warmth as well as the chance to find out what had happened inside.

Solo was sitting at a small French cafe table with Gaby, each of them nursing an oversized mug and a disgruntled look on their face. When Illya came in, Solo stood up and excused himself from his companion, heading for the bathroom. Gaby watched him go and avoided meeting Illya’s eyes as he passed her table.

When they were both inside, Solo slid the lock home while Illya pushed open the three doors to the toilet stalls, checking that they were empty. Solo heaved a deep, dramatic sigh and went to a urinal.

“What happened?” Illya grunted, turning his back to him.

“I want to preface this by saying that I initially raised issue with it,” Solo said over the sound of him urinating.

“What?”

“Gaby decided that she wanted to be the one to ‘get lost’, as it were, so while I distracted our guide, she turned a wrong corner and found something.”

“What?” Illya asked again, his voice getting deeper with insistence and frustration. He knew Solo was deliberately drawing the story out, milking it for dramatic effect. It was annoying, but he knew Solo would be even less inclined to tell him if he were to punch him.

“A second lab, one they hadn’t mentioned. This one was empty except for a few what I assume were technicians, young, each working at their own station.”

Illya waited a moment, sure that Solo would continue, until he growled a threatening, “ _And_?”

“Their own _computer_ station.” Solo finished washing his hands in the pedestal sink and wiped them on a handkerchief he pulled from a pocket of his slacks. His glasses winked in the light as he turned to face him, his face set into that mild-mannered polite calm that he wore when he was actively working to conceal his true feelings. Illya recognized it even as the cogs in his mind were turning fast.

Computers were a big find in some little lab. Governments controlled rooms full of computers, huge scientific communities owned hundreds of them, multi-national corporations – like UNCLE – used them daily, but a small medical lab owning enough for multiple employees to use them at once… that was simply not done. Much more was happening in that back room than what the other labs had going for them.

“So they found you out, then?”

“Possibly. Probably. Gaby and I will have to watch our backs on our way home. When the techs noticed Gaby in the room, they sounded an alarm in the entire building, bringing down a paramilitary security force five men strong that escorted us out without a single word. Our guide followed us out and told us off quite crossly, maintaining the façade that we were reporters who had disobeyed orders and gotten ourselves in trouble, citing the possibility of infection as the most dangerous outcome of our getting lost. But he could have just been attempting to keep our guards down, pretending that’s all he thought we were. Haik and Tawfeek could just as easily be booby-trapping our flats with dirty bombs that set off the moment we step through our doors.”

That wasn’t funny, and Illya crossed his arms and walked a few steps up and down the small bathroom, trying to think. “Computers that big and powerful such as the ones that they have, if I am assuming correctly, mean that the bioengineering is well under way,” he thought out loud, walking up five paces and then back five paces.

“It means that they’re close and they’re smart. They’re not just combining two bacteria in the hopes that they mutate. We’ve learned as much as two laymen can know about microbiology, and none of it is good when it comes to international security. Computers can calculate outcomes, spit out abnormalities they haven’t caught yet, determine where they went wrong with faulty generations of these bugs they’re breeding. It’s bad.”

It was, and Illya was thinking hard, trying to get ahead of it. “First things first, we have to call Waverly.”

“Already done. There’s a pay phone outside.”

“What are your orders?”

“We’re going back to our apartments like nothing happened, in case we’re being followed. Tonight there’ll be a strike. You’re lead agent. They’re flying in an assault group.”

He was glad that he was finally getting something to do, with the added bonus of a sort of authority. “What about you two?”

“We have our own lighter force, second wave. We’re the investigation. You’re the battering ram.” Solo clapped him on the back. “The team is organizing at your lookout spot, be there 2100 sharp. Gaby and I will be right behind.”

The other man left, leaving Illya alone with a sick feeling in his gut. He really should just go straight back to the lab to prepare, mentally and emotionally, while staying close to the main place of action in case there was movement that might give them more information, but he didn’t want to leave his partners behind. They were much more out in the open, as it were, and returning to their cover flats without knowing what could possibly be waiting for them was brave, braver than he would be if he stayed where he was in the shadows of the whole operation.

The door to the bathroom pushed open, making him jump, but it was just a small man with ugly glasses, peering at him peculiarly as he went into a stall. Illya left quickly. Back in the main room of the café, he saw that Solo and Gaby were gone, having left a few moments before, presumably back to their flats to write up reports of what they’d seen and send them to their editors for printing.

Outside, it was nearly full dark at 4:30 pm. Illya strode up the roadway, wishing he had his partners in his sights. He was probably five minutes behind them as they walked back to their building, and anything could happen in five minutes. At least it wasn’t raining anymore. It made it easier for him to catch a cab and navigate back to their block. He paid the gruff cabbie with the last of his English money, noting in the back of his mind that he would have to requisition more from UNCLE after the raid that night.

He was still thinking about this, that, and other things that had to do with the coming strike against the lab, walking up the dark, empty sidewalk, his gaze staring absently at the face of the building in which his teammates were holed up, when he noticed the curtains over Gaby’s window were fluttering. He blinked, took two stupid moments to connect the movement and the fact that the glass of the window was closed, and came to his senses.

He burst up the thin inner staircase and into the hallway of the third floor. The door to Gaby’s flat was open. He could hear the scrapes and bangs of the fight as he ran full-tilt into the doorway, assessing even as his muscle memory moved to intercept one of the men going two-on-two with his partners.

There were no guns out in play yet, but the man keeping Solo at bay had a wicked knife in his hand. Solo’s head was bleeding, and he held left arm awkwardly. Gaby was grappling on the floor, wrapped tight around her sparring partner’s back like a koala clinging to a eucalyptus tree. She had the man in a triangle hold, and her mussed hair over her face was flapping from the force of her breaths. Illya went for her first out of instinct, bending down and bringing the man back to his feet, Gaby in tow. He began to shake her off, wanting to be the one to finish it – she didn’t have to claim the kill – but then a sharp cry took both of their attentions away, over to Solo, who keeled over in an unceremonious bundle of knees and elbows. His bad guy turned away and charged Illya like a bull, wrapping arms around his middle and bringing him crashing down onto the coffee table, which snapped like matchsticks.

Illya flipped onto his stomach and swung an elbow up, catching the man on the throat, sending him reeling backwards, gasping, but he was reacting already, up on his knees and then backwards again, kneeling over the man and punching one-two-one-two, bloodying his knuckles on the assailant’s teeth.

“Illya!”

The sharp call to attention brought him up in time to save himself from a possibly-fatal slash directly at his neck. It ended up only getting his bicep and deltoid as he raised his shoulder and turned away in defense, but it went deep, the intention to kill giving the attacker an advantage. The Russian growled a guttural reply to the pain, spinning around with the momentum of the attack, bringing the other man with him. He swung a fist at the man’s belly, digging up and in under ribs, paralyzing the breath, stopping the second attack as it came fast and mean, the knife dripping his blood and Solo’s blood together. A flourish sent the knife skittering away as he broke the man’s wrist and grip on the weapon, making him choke on what would have been a scream if he had breath.

He stood with the attacker’s neck in his hands, squeezing the life out of him, literally feeling his pulse slowing beneath his palms, but Gaby shouted, “Stop!” and he dropped the man without a second thought, thinking maybe she knew something he didn’t because he trusted her judgement just as much as he trusted his own, and he turned back to her to ask her what else they needed to know other than what they’d found out already, and a flame pierced his thigh and toppled him with a crash, holding his leg where the knife was buried straight and deep in the muscle.

Gaby went for the man next, running with the swift speed that neither of the others could boast, but her quickness came with a lack of brute strength, and her attempt to tackle the man left them both stumbling sideways still on their feet. She held him back for a moment, using her smarts to work with his skewed center of gravity to bring him down, but where she was fast and smart, he was strong and desperate, and he smashed her up against the wall beside the door, leaving her to slide to the floor as he made his escape.

“Are you all right?” Illya grunted. Her eyes were open and alert, but she looked shaky as she recovered, smoothing her hair away from her face.

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

Solo was stirring, making small, mewling noises of pain. Gaby was back on her feet first, so she went to him, turning him over onto his back and checking him over. It was obvious he had a concussion – he’d been out cold for too long not to have one – but there were other concerns.

Illya pulled the knife from his leg with a hiss. Blood was pulsing gently from the wound. If it had hit the artery or another major vein, he would be dead already. He was lucky. He looked up as Gaby came to him next, kneeling next to him and bringing her hands down to his belt.

“One thing at a time,” he said with a wan smile as she unbuckled the leather and pulled it from his waist with a snap.

She didn’t answer as she belted it back up again at the very top of his thigh, pulling the tourniquet tight and drawing from him another hiss. She wasn’t meeting his eyes.

Solo stood on unsteady legs, holding a tea towel to the wound on his forehead that matched the scab on Gaby’s from the plane crash only a few days before. “We just got seriously licked,” he said in a raspy voice.

“We have one of them,” Illya said, trying to bring a positive light to it. He hadn’t realized it during, but the man whose face had been destroyed by his aching knuckles was well and truly dead. As seconds ticked past, he was becoming more and more aware that letting the second man escape had been a serious mistake, as well. Gaby was lurking with her tail between her legs, her chin low against her chest as she wiped at blood stains on her sweater.

“Where’s the other?”

“He got away,” snapped Gaby, going to sit at one of the kitchen chairs that had been upended in the battle.

“How did that happen?” Solo regarded her with a carefully manicured expression of allegiance and interrogation, good cop and bad cop playing off each other in the twitch of eyebrows and lips.

“Why does it matter? He’s gone and they know we’re not reporters. Worse still, they must know we’re going to be coming tonight.”

Solo decided not to comment, surprising the other two enough that they raised their gazes to look at him as he walked to the sink to wet the tea towel and dab at his wound again.

“How is your head?” Illya asked, filling the awkward silence. He began to wish that he’d given chase, his injured leg be damned. It would have been better than sitting on the floor on top of the fractured wood pieces of what had been Gaby’s pretend coffee table.

“Aching, thank you. I guess I’ll be the one to call Waverly, yet again. He’ll start to think I have a crush or something.”

As Solo manned the telephone and spoke into it with a cheerful, “Alex, old chap! Do _I_ have a story for _you_!”, Illya tested his leg, bearing half of his weight on it and feeling it wobble. Gaby came over, sliding her small frame under his arm and helping him walk a few paces. Her fingers were spread, hand pressed hard to his belly, holding him up. He looked down at the top of her head, not sure if he should say something or not. He was trying not to blame her for the mess of letting a witness go back and report what he’d seen.

There were a few possibilities, none of which ended with the UNCLE agents in the clear in any sense. Either those two men were from the lab, and they’d attacked because they’d overheard the two agents talking and figured out what they really were, thereby revealing part of the espionage and the fact that the government was on to Haik and Tawfeek, or they weren’t part of the lab and were just two unfortunate home invaders who stumbled onto a pair of victims they never should have tried to tangle with. If the former, killing both had the same effect of killing neither: the higher-ups from the laboratory would know something was up when their operatives did not check in with information or return from the surveillance. If the latter, killing only one left a wounded, angry man with a vendetta. It was a true clusterfuck, as American G.I.s liked to say.

“It is not your fault,” he heard himself saying to Gaby quietly as she helped him sit on the couch next to the rubble of the fight. “I would not have killed him anyway.”

“Liar,” she said, her teeth sharp on the word. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, but you did, and we have to live with it.” He tried to grin, letting her off the hook, but he knew she would continue to blame herself, even if she followed the same course of logic that he had come to. Any outcome was a bad outcome. “Listen,” he continued, forcing her to meet his eyes. “They knew who we were already, or else why would they have followed you home and tried to kill you? Letting one go is nothing but one extra body we will have to leave behind later on. None of us died. We are still together.”

She took a moment, her dark eyes flicking back and forth between his own, her movie star lips pursed in a sort of pout. Then she nodded, accepting this version of events. He hesitated, then took one of her hands in his own, squeezing reassuringly. She folded her fingers in beneath his.

The rest of the night passed in a blur. Dr. Cecily Franke came to the apartment with Waverly and a few other agents, checking the three of them over with a critical eye and several passive-aggressive tuts, mentioning something about a twenty-four-hour rest that never came to be. Gaby and Illya were cleared for the raid that night, but Solo was kept back; he would spend the night manning stations alongside Waverly at UNCLE HQ, monitoring their frequencies. Rearrangement was needed now that he was on light duty. Agent Jones, the ever-present second tier agent who had followed Solo to hell and back in pursuit of justice, was given lead duty for the backup team, as Gaby did not have enough experience. Illya, of course, kept his lead position, guarding it jealously and loomingly as Waverly went through a list of names and ranks with a pen in his fingers. The Russian made sure to stand behind him and pull his hat down low over his eyes, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

Midnight found him standing in a dark, dirty alley, dressed all in black, making eye contact with six other identically-dressed men as they checked their weapons one last time and shuffled their feet, keeping warm in 1 degree weather. They’d been grouped together for hours; they had come together and then spent the night deliberating, preparing their plan of action for when they actually went into the building, a building which possibly contained germs that had been engineered to be as deadly and virulent as possible. Illya was wearing a high-tech headset connected to the terminal at UNCLE HQ. He half-listened to the radio chatter, mostly ignoring it until he heard the word, “Go.”

They went.

His team broke through the back door, marching in with their weapons up. They were on a no-shoot policy at the moment, knowing that a single stray bullet could be their downfall if it happened to break a safety partition that kept fresh air out and deadly viruses in, but they all liked to be prepared. Illya, at the head of the formation, walked quickly and quietly, but the heavy thumps of their boots struck the tiled floor and reverberated through the empty halls. The lab was dark and cold, obviously closed down for the night. The scientists who worked here did not burn the midnight oil. It was eerie, even more so than any of the other places he’d had to break into in the middle of the night when no one else was around, because he was so aware of the ever-present threat of deadly disease.

He heard over the radio that the second team had also made entry behind them, going a different way down the corridors. They hadn’t been able to requisition blueprints for the structure, but Gaby had walked him through the turns she had taken while they were there undercover, and he knew where to go to try and find the hidden laboratory room she had stumbled upon. When he turned through a door into another hallway, one that was dreary and dark and windowless, he knew he was on the right trail. He led the team down to the opposite door, counted out a threebeat with gloved fingers, and pushed through the swinging double doors.

The room inside was just as Gaby had described, save for being empty of other souls. Long tables full of glass chemistry ware dominated the middle of the room in parallel lines. Around the perimeter, tall computer banks stood as sentry soldiers, blinking rows of little lights in the darkness and humming from electrical power. The room was very warm from the energy coming off the terminals.

“What next, _kapitan_?” murmured his second-in-command, a softspoken man named Reeve who had accepted the Russian without malice, unlike some of the other soldiers in UNCLE’s employ.

“Press forward,” he replied, loud enough for the others to hear but still quietly so that he didn’t disturb the spooky atmosphere in the room. It almost felt like sacrilege to do so. “That door.” He indicated which with the barrel of his AR-15. A doorway into the unknown stood on the opposite wall from them, beyond the rows of tables. It was through there that he wanted to go. The second team would finish sweeping the rest of the building soon enough and would join them in this room. They could meet up and go in together.

They waited in an orderly group for two minutes without incident, without sound except for their breaths passing through their balaclavas. Then the door across from them opened.

In unison, all seven rifle barrels were up and pointed out at the figure who came through the door, but Illya had not given the order to shoot, so they didn’t. They did shout muffled commands of “Get down! Hands up!” but those weren’t heeded.

The man who walked into the room had the posture of one who was terribly unconcerned with the ruckus. He was carrying a large file and looked up from it with a mild air at the commotion. In the darkness, his features weren’t completely visible, but Illya was sure he was looking at either Haik or Tawfeek. That mustache was hard to miss.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” the man said with a flavored French Moroccan accent. “May I help you with something?”

“Put your hands up and don’t come any closer,” Illya said.

“A Russian. Most interesting.” The man stroked his mustache with one hand, the folder still in his other hand drifting down towards the table.

“I said don’t move!” Illya steadied the sight at the man, threatening him with the muzzle.

“I admit, I was not expecting a Russian. Are you all Soviets, or is this an international brotherhood type of operation?”

“I will shoot.”

There was a tinny sound of glass breaking. The man raised his hands slowly, having placed the folder on the table in front of him. “I am unarmed.”

“What was that noise?” Illya demanded, inching closer.

“What noise?”

“What did you do?” he snarled. Behind him, his soldiers were sticking close like cattle, but he could feel their unease. Every instinct was screaming at him to retreat. This was a desperately unknown situation, and it wouldn’t be fair to lead them into an ugly death if the plague doctor before them had done something.

“Relax, comrade. It’s just tear gas.” The man revealed a smoking canister, balanced in the curve of his palm, produced from one of the deep pockets of his lab coat and sleight-of-hand hidden until the perfect moment. He tossed it almost casually, so that the acrid white smoke hissing from both ends made lovely swirls in the still air of the enclosed room.

Illya fell back against his men, felt them shuffle and grab for the gas masks they had hanging from their hips, but the gas was stinging at their eyes beneath their goggles and making their noses run as they began to cough and twist against each other. He looked up in time to see the flourish of a lab coat hem going back through the door from which the stranger had come before he succumbed, coughing and choking and pushing the soldiers back through the door.

They ran headlong into the backup team, ending up in a tangled scrum that took several confused moments to sort out. Gaby helped Illya to his feet and asked him what had happened.

“We got licked,” he growled. Sometimes there was no other way to put it.

Several hours later, dawn was breaking over the eastern horizon. UNCLE HQ was a hotbed of energy, agents and crews and operatives all working together to figure out what to do next.

The three partners stood together in a row of heights and mutual frustration, identical expressions of distaste on their weary faces. Illya in particular was uncomfortable; the tear gas had left him with red eyes, a sore throat, and a clammy feeling on his skin. Dr. Franke had once again held court over the seven members of the strike team, fussing over their whining with equal parts sympathy and impatience. When he had, once again, been cleared to return to the main floor of the organization, pink tones had been tinging the sky through the floor-to-ceiling windows and magnificent view of the Thames that their headquarters boasted. He was feeling the fatigue of the night and the sting of several defeats in a row.

“Well, that’s all we can do for now,” sighed Waverly, looking up from his place at the head of the conference table in the center of the open floor plan of this story. “Go kip on the cots downstairs. We’ll need you fresh for whatever we decide to do next.”

For once, the three of them did not argue in the slightest. They’d spent the past few hours deliberating back and forth, arguing with intelligence agents both higher and lower than them on the UNCLE totem pole, including their very own Alexander Waverly, and they were at the end of their rope.

Illya walked with a shuffling pace. His stomach was twisting with slippery eels, and his cheeks were hot with shame and lethargy. Beside him, Solo and Gaby were cracking their joints, patting the bandages on their wounds, smoothing the wrinkles on their clothes. They were restless, even in this state of near-exhaustion, and nothing would help it except action. A few hours’ rest would leave them with an impatient edge that would sharpen to near-critical levels by the time they woke up again.

He picked a private room, closet-sized but comfortably heated and dark, and left himself in a few blissful moments of solitude. The bunk rooms at HQ were tended by a private housekeeping force, and though the blankets on the cots were scratchy Scottish wool, it would be the best sleep he’d had in years. He pulled the string to the bare overhead bulb and had time to pull back the single blanket on the cot before his eyes rolled back into his skull and all the feeling went out of his legs. The ground rushed up to meet him. The light above him winked out.


	5. Maelstrom

They left Illya at his own bunk room and continued down the corridor. Napoleon was nursing an aching head and a bruised ego; it wasn’t the first time he’d been bested in physical, hand-to-hand combat, but it stung each time he had to be saved by someone else, even his two partners. For so long, his mantra in life had been to rely on no one but himself, and rolling on the floor while Gaby and Illya took over what should have been a simple fight was something he did not want to see repeated anytime soon.

He wanted to say something to Gaby – any length of time that passed without him saying at least a quip or two was wasted time, in his opinion – but he truly didn’t have anything on his mind that he wanted to share. The raid on the lab had been a bust. The fully armed and operational teams of special ops had been a bust. This whole mission was, so far, an ugly, unpleasant affair, one from which he couldn’t wait to distance himself with a few weeks spent on a warm, sunny, white-sanded beach and girls wearing that new bikini swimsuit that was taking the scandalized world by storm.

They were down at the end of the hallway, the end of the corridor of sleeping bunks, and neither of them had followed Illya’s initiative by breaking off and entering their own closet. They turned and regarded each other, her chin up, his chin down, maintaining steady eye contact as they each tried to read the other.

“Well,” he said, stuffing his hands into his trouser pockets. Then he was quiet again.

“We can’t just stand here,” Gaby said gruffly, as though she’d been considering it.

“Shall we retrieve Illya and get back to plotting, then?”

“Let him sleep. At least one of us needs to be well-rested.”

 Napoleon considered this, nodding sagely, then abruptly turned on his heel and headed back the way they had come. “He wouldn’t want to feel left out,” he said over his shoulder at Gaby’s warning noise behind him.

“Solo, don’t! We can work without him.”

“Of course we can,” he said, getting to the door and knocking. “But we don’t have to. He’s had three whole minutes of sleep, to our burly Russian that must be a lifetime.” He knocked once more then turned the handle, pulling the door open and half-expecting to dodge a punch. There was no way Peril was asleep quite yet, but he would possibly be half-undressed and vulnerable, and if there was one thing Napoleon had learned over the years, it was never poke a sleeping Soviet.

“Rise and shine, Peril, cause we figure-”

Illya was lying on his back, rigid and thrashing. His eyes were open but completely unseeing as every muscle in his body twitched, contracting and releasing in random bursts. His shoes beat a tattoo against the hard linoleum floor, his arms waving at his sides with his fingers contorted grotesquely. A dark stain had formed on the front of his gray trousers, and his pale complexion was aflame with the shine of a fever. He was making a grunting, snorting sound through stiff, half-mast lips.

Napoleon knelt immediately, putting his hands on the other man’s chest, not holding him down but just in the instinct of doing something. “Gaby,” he said sharply, when he heard her come up behind him and gasp, “Get to a phone and lock down the building. Lockdown, no one in or out, understand?”

“Yes,” she said, to her credit.

“Then call Cecily.”

She ran.

He placed a hand on Illya’s forehead, feeling the burn beneath his fingertips, and saw that a white foam of spittle was beginning to leak out between the Russian’s lips. He grunted and heaved Illya onto his side, his head lolling until he placed his own hand between his skull and the floor, holding his weight up with his other hand on the man’s hip. “It’ll be all right, Illya,” he said.

A klaxon alarm rang with the suddenness of thunder, drowning out everything. Dimly, he was aware of a stirring in the building – doors everywhere were opening, heads poking out of offices into hallways, people standing up from their desks and breaking off the conversations they’d been having. Beneath his hands, Illya gave a last shuddering gasp and then began to relax, the twitching petering out as the electrical signals that had gone haywire in his brain fell away from their rapid-fire machine gun pace. He breathed long and deep, but mechanically, sounding like the hiss of the iron lungs that had kept Napoleon’s generation alive in his youth. Napoleon licked his lips and felt for a pulse. It was there, thank god, fast but strong.

Cecily and her nurses, ever-present and professional, ran down the hallway in record time. Napoleon could hear their heels clacking on the linoleum as they came up behind him. The doctor shoved past him, not rudely but with urgency, and he fell backwards onto his bottom, refusing to leave. More and more people were coming down, the curious and the morbid, as word must have spread like wildfire in the way that only gossip can.

“How long did it last?” she asked him without looking, leaning over his teammate’s body and doing her own preliminary checks. A stretcher was being wheeled up to them by two more nurses from UNCLE’s very own medical ward a few floors below, where agents and officers went for medical care when the pursuit of the same in a public hospital would bring questions that the security services did not care to answer.

“Not more than three minutes,” Napoleon said, admiring Cecily’s brisk down-to-business style even as sweat trickled down his spine.

“What’s wrong with him?” Gaby asked. She must have come back at some point, but he hadn’t noticed.

“He’s only asleep now, but we have to figure out what caused the seizure in the first place. Napoleon, put the building into lockdown.” Her French accent was clipped with the speed of her words; Napoleon remembered the impression he’d made of her long ago, while they lay side-by-side in her Rococo bed, that her mind worked twice as fast as her speech, and her fingers twice as fast again. Back then, that had served him in ways very different than it would Illya now.

“I did that,” Gaby said quickly.

“Good. You two need to come with me back to the med ward. You, you, you.” This she directed at a few of her nurses, a hodge-podge of young and old, black and white, male and female. Napoleon had never given them much notice before, but now he would be their biggest and loudest supporter. “Go through every sleeping bunk. Find the rest of strike team Alpha. Get them to me, despite any shape they’re in. You, go to Waverly, tell him to call in every member of team Beta, wherever they are. We need every single body who had visited UNCLE in the last day to come back, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the nurse.

“How did tear gas cause a seizure?” asked Gaby as the rest of the medical team gently rolled Illya onto the flat backboard of the stretcher before lifting him to the collapsed bed. Napoleon had backed away to stand beside her, aware of his agonizingly useless presence there.

“It didn’t,” replied Cecily grimly, pushing her glasses back up her nose with her middle finger. She used scissors to tear through Illya’s long-sleeved shirt all the way up to the shoulder before wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his sculpted bicep. “This is something else. Come on.”

Obediently, like shamed puppies, the two remaining agents of the famed UNCLE trio followed behind the squeaking stretcher, huddled close for some morbid sort of comfort. Napoleon found himself monitoring Gaby even as she was probably doing the same to him, watching for any signs of stiffness or weakness in her legs, waiting for her eyes to roll back and for her to fall to the floor in the same terrifying ordeal as he’d witnessed with his other partner. At the elevator, everyone crammed in close, uncomfortably aware of Illya’s eerie unconsciousness. Napoleon couldn’t help but think that the Russian would have rather died than be subject to the sort of pitying scrutiny it took to be lying supine on a stretcher with friends and colleagues standing around, staring. He decided he would never mention it.

In the medical ward, Napoleon and Gaby were immediately thrust into closed-off, private rooms, where they were forced to strip and cleanse in emergency contamination showers kept expressly for the purpose of biological agent infection within the headquarters building. In the hot steam, he scrubbed at his skin until it was raw and red, trying hard to ignore the male nurse standing just outside and watching him through a round porthole window, a thick paper surgical mask covering everything but his eyes. He came out again, sweating from the heat, and donned flimsy doctors’ scrubs before being whisked away for a full medical examination such as he hadn’t had since being drafted into the army. He answered every question as truthfully and soberly as possible. The brush with mortality, as close as it was, was hard to swallow.

He was cleared as medically sound with a probationary period, so he and Gaby were allowed to go back into the deeper part of the ward and watch Illya as he recovered. He was still unconscious, but his heart rate, blood pressure, and other observable statistics seemed to be maintaining semi-normal levels, save for his temperature which rose until it hit a dangerous, worrying peak of 103.2. He was placed in a sterile room, monitored by a rotating shift of nurses, and kept there for the better part of an hour with no change.

Other members from both strike teams came into the medical ward in varying states of unrest. Every man from Gaby’s team was cleared just as they had been, but they were also kept quarantined in a larger room that was getting full with frustrated, nervous energies. Members of team Alpha fared slightly less well. Everyone from Illya’s team seemed to be fine until, one after another in a sort of domino effect, three men fell with seizures and the same high core temperature. The medical ward became a bustle of energy as every nurse, doctor, and assistant was working twice over, stabilizing patients or screening new ones as they came in from hither and yon, bewildered and in the dark. Napoleon heard through angry mutters that the entire building was effectively shut tight; no one was allowed to leave, phone out, or even open windows. One poor civilian mail boy was trapped in the basement, a prisoner to the activities of an organization the likes of which he couldn’t even fathom. He’d been given the excuse of a gas leak and then told to keep his trap shut while they figured it out. MI6 and the CIA were not known for handling civvies with kid gloves.

Waverly came to them within a quarter of an hour, waiting patiently behind the glass partition of the quarantined section of medical ward rooms, until Napoleon and he were able to speak with some sort of privacy.

“It was Tawfeek,” said Napoleon to him.

“Well, we know that,” bustled Waverly, shuffling some papers in his hands. “Illya and the others testified to that in their post-operation debriefings.”

“What I meant is that it was Tawfeek who did this.”

“We know that too, Solo.”

Napoleon clenched his hands into fists, restraining himself. He was not known for violent outbursts, but it would be fairly satisfying to punch the glass. Beside him, Gaby came up and leveled a stare at their handler.

“What do we _not_ know?” she asked him. “That might help us break it down.”

“We don’t know what it is,” Waverly said brightly, the sarcasm almost dripping. “We don’t know how to cure it. We don’t know if there even is a cure. We don’t know if everyone in this building is infected. We don’t know if it got out, we don’t know if it’s in the city or the country or the continent, we don’t know –”

“Enough,” Napoleon growled. “What can we do? Gaby and I and other officers. Once we can leave, where are you sending us and what are we to do?”

“We’re not going back to the laboratory,” said Waverly after a moment with his eyes closed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, seemingly calmed down from the crack in his British standoffishness. “That is officially under the scrutiny of the Americans’ Center for Disease Control. You two are going to go do some footwork.”

‘Footwork’ was an umbrella term within UNCLE and the other security services. It might mean the actual footwork of following and monitoring of select security threats; the engagement and investigation of a certain person or place; or an in-depth confrontation and resolution with a mark. In-depth meaning fists and bullets. Napoleon knew which interpretation he was hoping for. He didn’t know, yet, which one Waverly meant. He waited impatiently to feel the conversation out.

“Do you know when we can be released?” Gaby asked. “They won’t tell us.”

If Waverly had an answer, they never found out. Behind the two partners, in the room beyond theirs, alarm bells rang furiously. The two of them ran to the opposite window, pressing their palms to the glass. On the other side, Illya was devolving into another seizure, this one much more furious and frantic. Nurses poured into the room from the airtight security lock that kept his room sterile.

“Fuck!” Napoleon spat.

“It’s worse,” said Gaby, her dark eyes shadowed as they moved and followed the activity going on.

“Waverly,” Napoleon cried, turning away from the sight of his partner – his friend – going through an ordeal he couldn’t imagine, “You need to get us out of here and into the field. We need to do something to help.” _Help him_ , he meant, but that was unspoken and avoided. He had no medical expertise. He had no knowledge of diseases. He had skills in getting information out of other people. That’s what he needed to do.

Waverly was watching through two sets of glass. He was even more removed from the situation than they were, all the way in the other room, but Napoleon could tell he was invested. He’d taken the Russian agent into the fold of the Western-run operation, allowing him intelligence and leeway and all sorts of get-out-of-jail-free cards that the KGB would have balked at if the situation was reversed. UNCLE took care of their own in the pursuit of taking care of the people of the world, up to and including the members of the Soviet Union who would sooner spit than take a helping hand proffered by the West. The international operations that officers of UNCLE involved themselves in were much bigger than the petty squabbles run by harrumphing governments on both sides. The KGB had allowed Illya to stay on in the hopes of gaining some sort of insight into the world of British and American intelligence services, much in the same way that the CIA and MI6 desperately itched to get some agents on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Everyone knew Illya’s role as an agent of the Soviets. Most of the higher-ups in UNCLE and its parent governments understood that Illya brought back information on the times that he was released from duty and sent to the wind, just as Napoleon went to New York and Gaby tried to make a home for herself in a country that had allowed itself to be wrenched apart. Illya had the split loyalties and dual allegiance of a classic traitor, only with the morale and resolve to stay above the pressure of leaning too far to one side. He toed the line of east and west with a delicacy that had impressed most of those around him, up to and including Alexander Waverly, who already spent much of his time babysitting his pet project Gaby. Adding the Russian spy into the mix, allowing him to take back choice pieces of not-too-sensitive-but-important-enough information to his crusty Soviet superiors, had been the kind of delicate work that Waverly excelled at. He’d been given command of the unit and all the pomp and circumstance that went along with it, including close and personal relationships with his agents. He cared about the discomfort Illya was experiencing almost as much as Napoleon did. He saw this in his superior’s eyes.

“Waverly,” insisted Gaby, knocking two knuckles on the glass between them, having gone away from watching Illya’s second seizure in as many hours. “What can we do?”

The Brit focused down on her, the lines in his face sharpening with mounting rage and determination. Napoleon was glad to see this. It meant his similar feelings of bloodlust and energy were valid.

“Find the bastard.”

The footwork to which his boss referred turned out to be the boring kind, the one that involved nothing more than rifling through papers and connecting the dots in theory only. Napoleon returned to the main conference room within a quarter of an hour from being released with Waverly and Cecily’s permissions, under the strict orders to stay on the premises and do on-site investigative work only. He went straight to the file room and began to look back through the notes that secretaries had typed up from the oral debriefing each of the agents had given in private when they returned to the home base. He reread each page, his eyes skipping over the paragraphs and indented lines of dialogue. He needed clues. To find the bastard, as it were, they needed to find a few other people first. His first target would be the nervous, simpering Hawkins, who had given the tour around the lab and had been unusually angry when he’d discovered Gaby snooping. He had been the one to first sound the alarm, using a telephone to call in a big-armed man who had apparently been waiting on the sidelines for any sort of drama or development with the intruders. While Napoleon and Gaby were being escorted out, Hawkins had followed behind, angrily ranting about breaches of etiquette and trust, lamenting the loss of accountability in printed news. Napoleon had noted that the man had maintained his belief of their cover as newspapermen, but he hadn’t been able to pin down whether the man had been simply playing along or if he really did still think they were just doddering journalists who had not followed the rules.

He spent a good ten minutes in the room, poring over sheets of paper, his back rigid. When Gaby walked in, he checked her expression to read if her own mission in the building had been successful. She nodded firmly, hefting a knapsack further up her shoulder.

“How are you doing?” he asked her as he was replacing all the files back into the order that the office secretaries had perfected.

“I’m fine,” she said gruffly, throwing him a peculiar glance.

“We might not make it back in time with any information that can save him,” he continued, goading her. He was doing it to make himself feel better, in case she became emotional and he could be the rock to which she looked for strength, or perhaps maybe because it distanced himself from the whole situation, or again maybe he was voicing his worst fears in the hopes that she could comfort him.

“I know, Solo. We’re going to try our best.” She tapped a finger against her other elbow, watching him.

He should have known she would not do what he wanted her to do. Gaby Teller forged her own path in her work. She had never been good at following orders in the exact way that was intended; she always managed to find a way to complete her task that better suited her. Napoleon deeply respected that about her. He was the exact same way.

“Then let’s go.”

They slipped through hallways and darted down several floors of stairs, feeling horribly exposed in a building that was as empty as they had ever seen it. All employees of UNCLE were holed up in the medical ward, and they wouldn’t be spotted by any stray pairs of eyes, but Napoleon was aware that there would be some sort of closed-circuit video surveillance system in place in case of intruders. Of course, any people contracted to constantly monitor the little televisions would also have been called to the quarantine. Still, he moved as though he were in danger of being caught.

They came out from the echoing concrete stairwell into a dark hallway, lit by flickering overhead lights. They were in the basement level, the one part of UNCLE HQ that they both personally had never been to. Gaby had done some quick reconnaissance after completing her initial task, and she’d found a way out with ease. They’d been told to stay put until the lockdown was lifted, but they’d also been told by their superior officer to ‘find the bastard’, and that was the order they were going to follow.

Gaby led him down the hallway, turning through a nondescript door into what looked like an old storage room. There was a window high up on the opposite wall, letting in gray overcast light. Several tall stacks of old cardboard boxes leaned precariously against one another, written on in old, fading ink. Napoleon slid the knapsack from his partner’s shoulders and pulled the drawstrings open, more nervous for this part than for what was coming next. Gaby’s job, while Napoleon had been going through the files, had been to procure sets of clothes for both of them. They were still wearing the mint-green scrubs given to them after their vigorous disinfection, but those wouldn’t do while they walked down London streets. Gaby had stolen into Waverly’s office first, taking from his wardrobe a full, gray, English-cut suit and emerald green tie which perfectly suited Napoleon, if he did say so himself. For herself, she had taken something of Cecily’s: black, slim-legged slacks and a cream turtleneck sweater. There had been no coat in her office, she said resentfully, as they changed with their backs to each other. He buttoned up his waistcoat with some satisfaction, despite the morbid situation. Overall, he preferred Italian-style suits – they fit his figure more flatteringly than even the bespoke English kind – but this would do. Gaby herself looked as presentable as he had ever seen her, though she was in a bad mood and would not smile.

He lifted her through first, letting her balance and hoist the knapsack which contained the rest of their supplies, and then took her hand and scraped the bottom of his Italian leather Oxfords against the cement wall, trying to get traction. When he had managed to squirm out onto the alleyway ground, he stood, wiped his front, and they set on their way together.

It was a fresh morning, sunny and clear and frigid; Gaby shivered beside him but did not say a word of complaint. They broke from tradition and took a commuter-crowded Underground train several stops and changes away from HQ, blending in with the rest of the bleary-eyed populace who shuffled newspapers and concealed coughs behind their elbows.

Napoleon was high-strung, though he took care not to show it. He was not sure what he would find when they got to their destination. Hell, he was not sure he would even survive to get to it. Each twitch or twinge in his body set off alarm bells that had him soaking the armpits of Waverly’s shirt. He was not normally such a hypochondriac, but biological weapons were not the sort he had ever learned to disarm. He’d rather have a sparking stick of dynamite in his hand.

They reached the Tube stop where they wanted to disembark without incident, though, and when they climbed the stairs back to street-level, neither of them keeled over and died. They turned down a thin street full of flats and stopped at one particular white building, surveying the door and number with interest.

Breaking into Hawkins’ flat was easy. Gaby stood on Napoleon’s shoulders and broke the glass to the window they were nearly positive led into his kitchen. She shimmied inside, just as she had when they’d escaped from the UNCLE lockdown, and simply unlatched the front door and let Napoleon walk in as though he was a caring, visiting neighbor.

They prepared the living room, working with leisure as the day wore on. Both seized the chance to take long naps curled up in a squishy armchair smelling faintly of mildew, and they raided his ice box for cold milk and tea cakes. If Hawkins was indeed at work back at the laboratory, and not flown to the wind, as Napoleon would have done if he were in the nervous little man’s shoes, he would not be home until early evening.

Napoleon woke from a light snooze with a start sometime after twilight. He looked around for what had awoken him and focused on Gaby’s slight build, framed in the window seat by orange streetlight. She had made a small sound, just enough to bring her partner back to alertness. He rose, looked over her, and saw what had caught her attention. Then he returned to the armchair where he’d been dozing, crossed his ankle over one knee, and sat with his hands steepled in his lap. Gaby went to stand just behind the kitchen door directly down the hall from the front.

The key scraped in the lock and the door opened. Napoleon could hear the man singing off-tune and under his breath, wiping his feet on the front mat. Napoleon sat up straighter, his heart thumping with a sort of erotic anticipation.

“Blimey, it’s cold in here,” the man muttered to himself. There was a thump of shoes being kicked off and a jangle of keys being slipped into a coat pocket. Soft footsteps came down the hall and paused in the arched entryway to the living room. A lamp beside the doorway illuminated, washing Napoleon with light and briefly blinding him, having grown accustomed to the gloom as the day had worn on.

“Good evening, Mr. Hawkins,” he said with his own genteel velvet, smiling knowingly at the man’s blanching face. “I believe we have some business to attend.”


	6. Rip Current

As soon as Hawkins made it to the doorway of the living room, Gaby slipped from the kitchen, ghosting behind and past him to lock the front door and then coming back to stand directly behind the man. A small .22 revolver in her hand pointed out and aimed into his spine. She was almost of a height with him, and it pleasured her greatly when he stepped back at an immediate and instinctual response to Solo’s greeting, bumping first into the barrel of her gun.

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said, also dropping her fake accent when she heard Solo do the same.

The man squeaked in fear but did not turn around. Apparently he recognized the feel of a gun pressing into his lower back. “I d-don’t know anything,” he stuttered quickly.

“Not likely, so you can understand that we at least try,” Solo said, standing up and coming forward. He put a hand on Hawkins’ forearm and guided him to the armchair he had just vacated. Gaby circled around and leveled the gun at the man’s skull. Hate was coursing through her. Her finger, resting on the yoke just above the trigger, quivered as a visceral need to shoot the man shot like an electrical impulse down her arm. Solo gave her a look of warning as he was tying the man’s wrists together with the thin rope they had brought from HQ. She did not respond to the glance; she twitched her trigger finger, giving it a stretch, and let it rest back on the yoke, ready to fire in an instant if it came to that. Hawkins would not be her first kill – that had happened in Istanbul, much to her partners’ pride – and it would not feel nearly as messy now that she’d had some practice and the time she needed to fall into that killing mindset. She could still see Illya writhing on the floor beneath Solo’s hands. It wouldn’t be hard at all to squeeze the trigger.

“Please,” said the man tearfully, though he wasn’t resisting being tied up. “I’m just a lab assistant. I don’t have anything to do with those men.”

“What men?” Solo asked innocently.

Hawkins had not seen that trap until it was too late. He blustered, his face going red in a blush of anxiety. His mouth opened, his tongue snaking out to lick his lips, stalling for time. Solo leaned forward in a minute movement, but it was enough to bring the man close to tears. “I… I… they came to our lab. I don’t know why.”

“Yes you do,” snapped Gaby, but at another warning look from Solo, she quieted again, fuming.

“You do, don’t you, Hawkins?” Solo asked quietly. “You know why. You know where they were from. You know what they wanted.”

“I… I don’t,” squeaked the man. He pulled at his bindings for the first time, as if he’d only just realized that he was tied up by the wrists. “Please let me go.” He turned his face up towards Solo in a gesture of supplication, his tied hands coming up to claw at Solo’s shirtfront.

Gaby took a breath and let it out through open lips, calming herself, waiting for her time. Of course they had a plan, but as always, it was hard to see the end result through the muck of the actual process; she felt like a ship adrift in fog, bobbing impotently against the current.

Solo, meanwhile, had embraced his role fully. He looked down at the blubbering man for half a moment, then he raised his hand in a sharp, mean, backhanded slap against his fleshy cheek. The simian-faced man squealed in pain and masculine outrage at being manhandled so, falling back into his own overstuffed armchair, too proud to rub at the red mark rising on his face. He stared upwards again, this time in shocked anger, and Solo returned the eye contact with a gentleman spy’s impassive nonchalance at having taken the low road.

“Who are the men, Hawkins?” he asked, as if nothing had happened between them.

“They’re scientists,” spat their prisoner. He was eager to pretend that he was the victim in all this, that much Gaby could see right away. That would serve them well later on. His fear had dissolved to righteous indignation – who were these people, anyway, coming into _his_ home and _acting_ like such _brutes_?

“Scientists doing what, exactly?” Solo leaned back on his heels and placed his hands on his hips. At one point he had taken off his suit jacket and rolled his sleeves up his forearms. He looked perfectly comfortable and ready to get his hands dirty, and she was surprised their prisoner could not see it too.

“Doing _science_ ,” the man sneered. He received another slap for this one, on the opposite cheek. His face flamed like a schoolboy’s now, and she saw a glimmer of fear come back once more. His bravado was wilting.

“What kind of science?”

Hawkins did not answer readily this time; perhaps he thought passive resistance would be the way to go. Solo answered with a hard, driving blow into their prisoner’s belly, not with a fist which could kill him but open-handed, going deep and causing the most pain. Hawkins mewled and doubled up, his bound wrists getting in the way of his recovery position.

“What kind of science?”

Hawkins spat a few times, down onto his rug, and Gaby was disgusted and irritated at his weakness. He wasn’t bleeding anywhere, not yet, but he was acting as if he was Muhammad Ali up against his toughest opponent ever. _I’ll knock out a few teeth for you, if that’s what you want_ , she thought viciously.

“Hawkins, I’d like you to answer me.” Solo reached out and pulled the man back into a sitting position in the armchair. He left his hand on the man’s shoulder, close to his throat and ear, but he did not squeeze or claw just yet.

“They’re making something,” Hawkins said, his lower lip quivering. He still showed off a sort of anger, but he was afraid. Gaby could smell it. She itched to join in on the interrogation, but she had a different part to play. Later, later.

“What are they making?” asked Solo, but they knew the answer to this. These villains were making a bioweapon, something that could infect and kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of innocent people just for the crime of being born in society that differed from theirs. They needed the specifics. They needed to find a way for UNCLE scientists to manufacture a cure. They needed their partner to be all right.

“A weapon.”

“Marty, I have to tell you, I’m getting awfully tired of these one-word answers,” sighed Solo, standing up like a disappointed professor, his hands back on his hips. “I’m going to ask you to start telling me more.”

“I don’t know much more!” insisted Hawkins, who had jumped in surprise when Solo had used his first name. Apparently he hadn’t realized that their knowing his address wasn’t the extent of their intel on him. What else could they know, he had to be wondering. Family, friends? Lovers, secrets? Gaby was privately impressed with her partner. She was learning something new every day in the art of spying.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Solo said, a trace of kindness edging into his voice. So far, he’d been stern and unapproachable, but now he was beginning to thaw.

Hawkins looked nervously at his interrogator, breathing shakily. In an instant, so quickly that Gaby barely had time to blink in surprise, he was up like a shot, planning to run, and Gaby couldn’t believe his stupidity. Solo was right there, idiot, of course he would catch you, of course he would throw you back into the armchair with so much force that the whole thing almost upended, of course he would break your nose.

Hawkins cried noisily now, holding his two hands at his freely-bleeding nose, suffering and snorting as the blood ran and dripped. They would have to wait a few moments while he calmed down. At least, that’s what an innocent person would deserve. Hawkins would not be given any leeway. His delicacy would not be spared.

Solo put his hand out. Gaby felt a tiny thrill in her stomach as she handed the gun over, her face expressionless. Their prisoner watched this exchange, his gaze roving from her to him, following the sleek, dark metal as it went from hand to hand. He was deathly still, like a rabbit, while blood pulsed gently down over his lips. Then his eyes flickered over as Solo moved again, bending luxuriously to pull a long, metallic tube from the duffel bag they had brought with them from HQ.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked him as he screwed the tube to the end of the gun, doing it slowly to savor the moment. “You do, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.” Solo raised the gun to point it straight up; the silencer extended it by a good half a foot, making the weapon terrifyingly ominous in his hand. “Do you know what it does?”

This question, as with the others, was rhetorical, but Hawkins vocalized anyway, whimpers that escaped from him involuntarily. He was shrinking back, staring fixedly at the weapon.

Slowly, Solo lowered the gun in an arc, ending it pointed between Hawkins’ eyes. “You hurt my friend,” he murmured. “If you tell me what I want to know, I won’t hurt you in return.” He waited a beat, letting the moment between them fester, and continued, still speaking smooth and calm and dangerous, “What did the scientists make?”

It was unclear to Gaby at first why Solo did not give the man a change to answer properly. Before Hawkins could speak, if he was about to at all, Solo squeezed the trigger on the gun. It gave a sharp exhale of a sound, whispery and violent at the same time, and Hawkins doubled over screaming. For a wild moment she thought her partner had belly shot the man, and she was angry that now they wouldn’t get any of the information they wanted at all. Then Solo used his left hand to pull the man’s head back up by his shirt collar, and Gaby could see from her place behind and to the side that it had only been his calf muscle. The bullet had left a piteously small hole. He would probably never walk again without a limp, but he was at least alive, albeit writhing in pain.

“Now I’m going to give you a chance,” started Solo, and Gaby understood. “Tell me this time, or it’s the other leg.”

Hawkins blubbered and sniveled, false-starting on words over and over again. It seemed like he was stalling, and Solo raised the gun again to point at the other shin.

Gaby rushed forward, pushing the muzzle and long barrel of the silencer away from their prisoner. “Stop it!” she snapped at Solo, putting her body between him and Hawkins. “You’ve done enough!” She knelt at the man’s legs, bringing a handkerchief from the pocket of her slacks to wipe at the man’s face. Behind her, Solo made an angry sound of disbelief.

“Teller, what the hell are you doing?” he asked, trying to push her back to her spot beside the armchair, where she’d been standing guard and doing nothing else.

She rounded on him and shoved him backwards with a hand on his waistcoat. “Leave him alone, he doesn’t deserve all this! Look at him, Solo.” She knelt again, clearing his lips and chin of his blood. It had already clotted around his nostrils. The oozing hole in his leg was a worse injury, but she did not have any nursing experience sufficient for that. “Marty, I’m sorry about him,” she muttered. Hawkins’ bloodshot monkey eyes watched her, his wispy eyebrows brought together in anguish at his predicament. “I will get you to a hospital.”

Solo, who had stayed in his place where Gaby had pushed him, made another noise in his throat. “You’ll do no such thing, agent. We need to find out what he knows.”

“He doesn’t know anything more,” Gaby argued. “He told you that. If he did, he’d tell us right away. He’s a British citizen, he doesn’t want to be convicted of treason. They hang people for that.”

“I’m no traitor!” Hawkins burst out.

“Shh, of course you’re not,” Gaby said. “This was just bad circumstances.” She smoothed her hand over the man’s head, trailing down his neck as she cleaned away the last of his blood.

“It was,” grumbled the man petulantly. “They made me do it.”

“I know, Marty, believe me, I know. They always make you do things you don’t want to do.” She shot her partner a dirty look, directing this at him with Hawkins full in view of her rancor.

“Him too?” he asked, his voice dropping conspiratorially.

“Of course,” she sneered. “Why else would I be here? They just want someone to clean the messes. Well, I’m tired of it. I’m not doing anymore cleanup for them. I’m not going to let him hurt you. You didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t!” he agreed readily. His skin was blotchy, his nose was running with bloody snot, and he was breathing gaspingly as if he was winded, but now his face seemed to shine. “I wasn’t involved with the cultivation.”

“You weren’t, were you?” Gaby said, relieved to hear this. “I didn’t think so. You just saw everything, eh?”

“Yes and no,” said the man. “I was never involved with any of the strains. I didn’t even see the results with the rats, not until the end.”

“The end?”

“Before it finished. What they made.”

Solo began to speak, but Gaby rounded on him. “He’s talking to me, not you, _schweinehund_.” When she returned to Hawkins, she closed her eyes a moment, asking for patience, and then graciously nodded at him. “Please continue. What can you tell me about it? If you’re not a traitor, as I believe you’re not, you can help us. We can make sure you are rewarded for your help. And your poor leg…” She placed her hand on his thigh.

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” the man lied obviously.

“Poor, brave soul,” she murmured. “How’d you ever get mixed up in all this?”

“It wasn’t me, or my workers,” he said, settling down for a tale. His bullet wound was barely bleeding anymore, but he still touched at his nose every so often. When he put his bound hands down again, they rested on top of hers where it lay flat against his thigh. “They came with a lot of money and secrecy, so we let them work in our lab. They were going to change the world. By the time…” He shot a glance at Solo; he obviously felt guilt over this, and had hidden it for that exact reason. “By the time we figured out what they were doing exactly, and what they meant to do with their creation, we were in too deep. They knew our families, our lives. Our homes.” He grimaced at his living room, where he would probably never feel safe again. “We had no choice but to work with them.”

“What are they doing, Martin?” Gaby whispered, leaning forward. “What did they make?”

Hawkins looked down at her. For the first time, he appeared sad. “It’s going to kill millions.”

Gaby gulped down a whimper. She needed to save Illya. For all the countless times he had come for her – that time in Rome, that time in Istanbul – she had never really said thank you. It had been implicit, of course, her gratitude and appreciation for the burly Russian, but it was different now. If he died, he would go on to whatever afterlife there was without knowing exactly how she felt about him. About both of them. It was such a waste.

“What is it, Hawkins?” Solo asked from the shadows of the room.

Their prisoner gave him a reproachful glare, but he answered this time. “It’s from the genus lyssavirus. Oh, but of course,” he added, scornful of their blank faces. “I forgot, you’re not actually reporters. Have you heard of rabies? It’s much the same.”

A chill blew through the room, stabbing deep into the chests of both the agents. Gaby hadn’t feared much as a child – growing up in a ghetto was to thank for that – but her adopted parents had cautioned her from ever approaching the semi-wild dogs that roamed the streets of East Berlin at night. At best, she would bring home a stray that only became another mouth to feed. At worst, she would be bitten and contract any number of diseases or infections. The worst of those was rabies, which lived in the wild and preyed on any living thing regardless of race, creed, or standing. Rabies was terrifying in its wildness and incurability.

“So our friend has… rabies?” she breathed.

“No, it’s different. Same principles, however. It’s an encephalitic infection, a neurotropic. Causes symptoms you might be familiar with: fever, headache, confusion.”

“Seizures?”

“Yes,” said Hawkins, glancing over at Solo after he’d spoken the single word with strained dread. “In a severe case.”

“How do we fix it? How did they infect our friends?” Gaby leaned forward on her knees, arranging herself so that she took up most of Hawkins’ line of vision. She wanted him to concentrate and spill everything, not be distracted by the agent with whom he had much less rapport.

“They didn’t bother to synthesize a cure, but another lab could possibly do that themselves. It’s not as complex as rabies, and it’s fragile outside of the lab because of its newborn status. It doesn’t live for very long on surfaces. Dr. Haik had to break a capsule and hope that it entered the intruders’ mucous membranes. Let me tell you, making the pathogen to be completely airborne took years of hard work and research. Even if you’re not writing an article about viruses, you should appreciate the genius that went into the synthetization of a brand new species. It’s… unheard of.”

Gaby was repelled by the pride in his voice and knew he’d been lying before when he’d claimed not to be a traitor. No person loyal to their country would speak so highly of men doing their damnedest to destroy it.

“They’re planning on releasing it on the Underground when it’s ready. So far, it kills too quickly; that’s the problem with ultra-virulent diseases, they destroy the host before the host can provide a sufficient platform for widespread transmission throughout the populace. You agents are serving as an unwanted distraction.” He glared at them, even Gaby, who had been feeling like he was giving too much information too fast. Now she realized he wanted to vent. He was even more involved than even she’d first assumed. She wondered if Haik and Tawfeek had approached him or vice versa. It would certainly explain a lot. He continued to hold court, boasting, “But when their work is done, they’re going to release it and infect every person who uses the Tube. Then those people are going to board airplanes and breathe on others in the cramped seats, and go home and kiss their spouses and hug their children, and go to meetings at their offices. It will be worldwide by Easter.”

Gaby only had a few more questions. She prayed Hawkins would continue in this vein for a few minutes longer. “But how did Haik manage not to infect himself when he got the others? He must have been protected, somehow.”

“A host becomes immune after surviving infection. That’s another kink we have to work out. Haik and I noticed that the rats who managed to survive couldn’t get sick again. We vaccinated ourselves against a deliberately-weakened strain. A few days of the flu and voila.” He grinned nastily. Revealing what he knew seemed to have taken away the pain of his nose and calf.

The two agents of UNCLE managed to keep their faces impassive, but both of them had noticed the pronoun switch. So Hawkins was involved after all.

Gaby stood up. Hawkins watched her distance herself and seemed to slowly come to a realization. The color drained from his cheeks, and his lips began to tremble again. “Are you going to protect me?” he whispered. “I’ve told you everything I know. I want to help in any way I can.”

Gaby went to her partner, took the gun from him, and fired it. The man slumped back in his armchair, gasping at the hole in his upper chest. He slid down and puddled on the floor, trying to staunch the blood, but he was dead before he could do much more than regret.

Solo had watched this unemotionally. “We could have brought him back to HQ and questioned him more, you know,” he said.

“We could have, but we didn’t. We have to go back, tell them what we know.”

“You forgot to ask him where Haik and Tawfeek are now.”

“Oh well.”

Solo followed her out the window the way they had come in.

It took a week for UNCLE to regain a sense of direction in the pursuit, during which time Illya and his fellow infected agents did not improve. Two of them succumbed after a few days; Illya and the other man hung on by a shimmering thread of spider-silk, hovering in a maddening twilight between life and death.

Waverly was hopping mad, closer to a conniption than Gaby had ever seen him, but once he had calmed down, he was appreciative of the information the two agents had brought them. He gave lukewarm praise to Gaby and Solo for the good-cop, bad-cop routine they had arranged, noting that without Gaby’s restraint early on, the ruse that she was on Hawkins’ side would not have worked. It was the stuff of true espionage, he said. That did not stop him from grounding them, however, so for the next week they had to watch from the upper stories of the building as agents and officers dispersed to the wind, doing the sort of footwork that Waverly had wanted to see happen when he’d released them from the quarantine.

Cecily was now the most valued member of UNCLE, and she used her international connections to bring several of her scientific colleagues into the fold of the operation. UNCLE was becoming more and more worldwide, involving citizens of countries from the far west to the far east, and it was this global enterprise that proved to be the saving grace. Cecily and her scientist friends went hard to work in their own labs, trying to reverse engineer a cure for the virus they had dubbed ‘LDN-1’, for the city in which it had first, and hopefully only ever, appeared in public. She was first and foremost a healer, but she admitted a personal sort of interest that kept her in the laboratory instead of by Illya’s bedside, which is where Gaby personally thought she belonged.

At the one week mark from Day Zero, a fellow agent brought information that Haik was somewhere in Vauxhall. A team was organized to deploy that night. Gaby and Solo stood beside one another and let Waverly know, in no uncertain terms, that if he wanted to prevent the two of them from going along, he would have to have them killed. Hours later, in the shadow of the witching hour, they stood in tactical gear on the quiet, shining wet streets of the poor neighborhood, waiting for the signal. Their target was an exceptionally run-down strip of flats and social housing. Flybys from surveillance aircraft had revealed a suspicious energy source coming from within, and informants, a spy’s bread and butter, had reported a high number of unfamiliar men coming to and from. The intelligence was spotty and unproven, but it was all that they had to go on. Gaby had not apologized for killing Hawkins, but she could sense Waverly’s disapproval that she had acted without orders. It wasn’t her place to assassinate; leave that for MI6. UNCLE was above all that. They could have done much more with him, and for that Gaby was repentant. Now they could only hope that good, old-fashioned investigative work would be enough.

Much in the same way as the first raid a week ago, this one went off without a hitch in the beginning. The teams stayed in radio contact, and they all wore full-faced masks with lenses over the eyes. Solo and Gaby stuck together in the rear of the formation, their weapons up and ready. They did not speak or signal to each other much; the time was spent observing. The halls of the buildings were dark, dusty, and decrepit, and every officer had to take care not to go through any of the floorboards. There appeared to be nothing inside any of the rooms except for stray pieces of broken furniture. In one room, a doll’s head half-buried in muck gave the lead officer such a fright that he nearly set off a chain reaction of gunfire after he made a startled choke. The tension was offset by unprofessional joshing with their compatriot, but at the back, Gaby and Solo did not join in. When the sweep continued through the opposite door, they kept their eyes peeled. Something had definitely caught the attention of the airplane surveillances, but so far they had found nothing. It was suspicious, stinking of another trap.

At the end of a long hallway, the team paused. A door stood in front of them, thick and solid and suspicious. They would have to go through it one by one. At a one, two, three count, the lead officer burst through and brought his gun up, lowering it again after one or two heartbeats. It was only another hallway.

Gaby stood behind Solo, turned to face the hallway from which they’d come, her rear end brushing his as the team took orderly turns through the doorway. This strip of housing had been abandoned for what felt like decades, and no one had been inclined to take care of it for even longer, so the effect on her was a kind of dread. Dread at the spookiness, dread at what was to come, dread that they might not find anything at all and be brought solidly back to square one. If this was what being a spy was like, she was not sure she was ready for it. At least Istanbul had had a bit of glamour to it.

She turned around when she heard Solo go through the broken doorframe. He jogged a few steps to catch up to the team going down the hallway.

It happened in an instant. Sets of hands grabbed her face, her shoulders, her hips. Her mask was shoved violently aside so that one hand could press firmly down on her lips, stifling her gasp – she never thought to scream, damn her pride. In her blindness, she could see nothing in the gloom except a momentary glimmer of something like silver.

A pain pierced her neck, and then cold, and then nothing as she fell and did not hit the ground.

 

She woke violently, wrenching herself from unconsciousness as if she understood the implication long before her thoughts could catch up and piece together what had happened. Her second sensation was of more cold, though this one was more enveloping than the first one; it went deeper, down under her skin like the drugs they had given her.

It was bright in the room, a marked difference from the last place she’d been. She was sitting upright, tied sophomorically with rope to a hard metal chair. The room was tiled and polished, windowless and sleek and modern, and it was busy. There had to be at least ten people in the room, all men, all colors and ages. She was shunted off to the side, one long wall behind her head, observing the hustle and bustle.

One of the men, wearing a lab coat and sporting a bushy mustache, noticed her and came over. The others sensed this and looked up from their work, hunched over tables, staring into microscopes, scribbling on a long, tall chalkboard over at one end, before returning to whatever they were doing. She was less important, it seemed.

“Why did you take me?” she asked the man as he came within spitting distance, and she was gratified at his surprise that she had spoken. It was better to have the first word, so she’d snatched that from him.

“It seemed prudent,” said the man. It was either Haik or Tawfeek, but she could not remember any distinguishing marks to differentiate the two. It put her back on the defensive.

“Why?”

“You were getting too close.”

“So you bring me to the thick of it?” she asked, letting her own surprise color her voice. Normally she would have shut her mouth and glared, but the man was answering her questions and not asking any of his own, so she felt comfortable enough, despite her actual physical discomfort.

“Someone will come for you.”

“And then what?”

The man finally smiled, but the effect was sinister. “You’ll see.”

She regarded him coolly. “That’s not an answer,” she replied finally, aware that she sounded peevish.

“I don’t like to give away the ending. Are you thirsty?”

“No,” she growled.

“How did you find us?”

Gaby was thrown off by this switch in the conversation, but she knew she could recover if she did it correctly. “We’re better than you think,” she said, giving a no-answer answer, a taste of his own medicine.

“Indeed. I was impressed that you found the lab in Hammersmith. I was most displeased with Hawkins when he told me about the reporter charade. I saw it right away for what it was, but even with my foresight, we only had a day or two to prepare. He was an eager fool, but he did his best.”

“I killed him,” Gaby said.

“Not a loss to the medical world, I can say that. You needn’t have killed him, though.”

“Yes, I did.”

The man shrugged, not arguing. 

This lull in their conversation irked her; she wanted him to keep talking. Though she didn’t have confidence that he would, maybe he would slip up and reveal something too soon or too private. He had spoken the truth: someone would come for her. Solo and Waverly and the whole rest of UNCLE would not let her die this way. This brought her a tiny speck of hope, and she cradled it to her heart. For the time being, however, she needed to do her job and spy.

“Who are you, anyway?” she asked after they had stared at one another for a while.

“Dr. Galel Tawfeek. I would have thought that they briefed you on that.”

“I didn’t know if you were Tawfeek or Amine Haik,” she said, wanting him to know that she at least knew the names.

A grimace washed over the good doctor’s face. “Haik has the imagination but not the willpower for an operation like this. He’s not in London. Too boring, he said, too monotonous. Too rainy.”

“So, what, this is your whole party, then?”

“It was his idea but my creation. The others-” At this point he stopped, glanced at her. “I assume you know about the others.”

She nodded, remembering the briefing onboard the aircraft carrier but not these names. She made a piss poor agent.

“The others were financiers. This goes very high up, I’m sure you know.”

“So does my side,” she said.

“Ah, but your side does not have the same conviction. We have the power of righteousness.”

Gaby would have laughed, but his arrogance was making her nauseous. She struggled for the first time with her bonds, remembering that Hawkins had not struggled until sometime after being tied as well.

“Just relax, my friend. Your reinforcements will be here soon.” He turned to leave.

“Wait!” she said, knowing that keeping him talking was much better than letting him return to his work. A week was not much time in the scientific world, but she worried that they were close to their goals that Hawkins had mentioned. Making the virus stronger, making it more infectious, creating enough of it so that they could release it in the trains: all of these were on a timeframe. Her kidnapping was ominous.

“How did you know where we were looking? How did you find us in the building?”

Tawfeek grinned again. He savored this. “We have a mole in your midst.”

Gaby let him retreat this time. A cold sweat had broken out on her face and neck. She was still in her tactical outfit, stripped only of her helmet and her gun, but the refrigerated air of the room was stronger than her layers. A mole meant the death of an organization. A mole meant deceit, a betrayal so deep and so wounding that repercussions would reverberate for years, even decades, to come, if it did not spell the end of UNCLE to begin with. She racked her brain, names and faces flipping through like a rotary address book. Then she landed on one: Cecily.

She was new, she was eager, she was unknown to most of them. She claimed to have known Waverly way back when, but so much could have happened since the war, especially since the rise of communism. If that’s what truly motivated Haik and Tawfeek to work together with men from drastically different countries and backgrounds, what was stopping a young doctor from France, who had experienced firsthand the devastation of National Socialism, turn to a new way of life? Gaby was sad for a moment. She’d liked Cecily, despite her perkiness, her wit and charm and smarts. She’d appreciated the care she had given Illya and the others.

There was no way to tell how much time had passed since she’d been ambushed, nor how much time would pass again until she was found, so all she could do was sit back and wait to be rescued, yet again. For a while she considered that she’d rather go through Solo’s version of torture rather than have to listen to the droning voices of the men as they collaborated on making a biological weapon that could murder every stranger in Europe. Then she remembered how that had turned out, and instead she made herself breathe and relax. She was tired of being the kidnapped officer. It was funny that she and Haik had one thing in common: they both believed London was so goddamn _monotonous_.


	7. Vortex

Illya opened his eyes to sunlight and the smell of antiseptic. He stared upwards, taking stock of the situation before he attempted to move.

His body ached with the residual pains of a long illness, not unlike the flus he’d suffered as a malnourished child. His muscles were stiff and sore from underuse, and he could tell without looking that he’d lost weight. He felt weak as a newborn kitten.

He turned his head, testing that first, and found Solo hunched in the single armchair in the room, sitting with his elbows digging into his knees and his forehead held in his palms. By the sound of his steady breathing, Illya thought perhaps he was asleep. He opened his mouth, licked his lips, and croaked, “Cowboy.”

His partner looked up immediately. Illya received a shock at his appearance of weariness; there were lines near his eyes and on his forehead that hadn’t been there before. They stared at one another for a moment, each sharing an intimate relief that the other was all right. It was powerful, this connection that tied them, and he felt slightly woozy from the rush of adrenaline and affection from the release of what felt like days of tension. He’d been unconscious for a long time, he knew, and it was liberating to come back and not have to worry. Then Illya moved again, a subtle shift in his position as he tried to pull himself a little higher on the thin hospital mattress, and the moment was broken. Solo stood and came to him, something close to a smile playing around his lips as he put a hand on Illya’s shoulder and kept it there.

“Can’t beat that Red spirit,” the American tittered, finally cracking the joke that Illya had been waiting for. “Thought we’d finally found a way to kill you Ruskie devils.”

“Just feed us American alcohol,” grunted Illya obligingly, pulling himself up. Solo bent and began to crank the elevated half of the bed upwards, helping him.

“They said you would come around sometime today,” Solo said, answering the questions Illya had not yet asked but was preparing for. “We found out what it is, how to stop it. Well, how to fix it once it’s caught. It’s not a cure, but a treatment that they said you responded well to. They thought you would wake up this afternoon, so you’re ahead of schedule.”

“What was it?”

“A form of rabies, sort of. A virus. We found the lab assistant and got as much out of him as we could. Good news is, you’re immune now, so you’re going to be the big, bad Russian in the front of all the strikes from now on.”

“The others?”

Solo faltered, though more out of a performance than an actual misstep. He’d been waiting for this question and had prepared a theatrical answer. Illya knew this about him and knew he had to suffer through the pompous, regretful build up. “Three other men caught it, and none of them made it,” the American sighed. “One hung on for a while, but the fever was too much for his brain, according to Cecily. She saved your life,” he added. “She brought colleagues from _le Service_ over to help her synthesize a cure, and while they didn’t quite manage that, they managed to hold off you dying until the virus cleared away on its own. I didn’t understand most of the–”

“Where is Gaby?”

Her absence was suddenly and harshly felt. He couldn’t believe that this hadn’t been his first question; of course she would have been there to see him wake up, as Solo had been, if everything was all right. Her notable absence was like a residual wound from his illness that wasn’t healed. He still ached all over his body, but now some of the hurt was from a different cause.

This time, Solo hesitated for real. His eyes swept downwards. He took his hand away from Illya’s shoulder.

Illya stared at him, demanding that he answer. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good, to make Solo so unsure like that. He thought of his team, how the virus had halved it in a single instant, from one tiny vial or beaker or whatever it had been that Tawfeek had broken open to release his monstrosity. What if Gaby had caught it from him as she’d helped him up? He couldn’t remember a thing from leaving Waverly in the conference room to waking up in the bed, so it was very possible that there’d been some sort of transmission.

“Solo.”

“She’s missing.”

Illya leaned forward an inch or two. “What do you mean, _missing_?”

“We lost track of her.”

“What. Do. You. Mean?”

Illya was fully aware that he was not intimidating from his place in the hospital bed, wearing a thin gown, pale and bruised and shivery, but he was prepared to stand up and kick his partner’s ass if it came to that. His scare tactics came from a purely theoretical place, one that Solo respected even if he resented that it was directed at him. His partner was cognizant of the fact that of the two of them, Illya was the better fighter. They hadn’t had to come to blows in almost a year, and Illya was weak with recovery, but if he needed to, he could have beaten the truth out of him. So while Solo took several moments to answer, answer he did.

“We went out to find the men who did this, and while we were there, we got separated, and we haven’t found her.”

“How long?”

“Three days.”

Illya swept up from the bed, knocking his partner aside as he headed for the door.

“Peril, Jesus, you’re going to-”

“I’m going to find Gaby,” he snarled. “You should have done that without me.”

“I’m aware of that-”

“They could be doing horrible things.”

“We’re doing everything-”

“She’s saved your life more times than-”

“I know, that’s why we-”

“How could you just leave her out there-”

Ten steps down the hallway from his room, his knees buckled. He grabbed the wall for support and managed to stay on his feet, but the world was swaying with the movement of ocean waves. Solo tucked his head and shoulders underneath Illya’s arm and kept him upright.

“You’re no help to her like this. You need to rest.”

“And what are you going to do meanwhile?” Illya shot back nastily, in a temper that he understood and couldn’t quite control. “When you were taken I came for you-”

“I know, but-”

“And in Istanbul, when-”

“Illya,” Solo said sharply, helping him back through the doorway. “Don’t you _dare_ imply that I don’t care about Gaby’s well-being. She is my partner just as much as she is yours, and I care about her just as much as you. I can’t express how many times I have hated myself that I turned my back to her for that one instant, and when I looked up again she was gone. I have _hated_ myself for imagining all the things that they could be doing to her while I search one of the largest cities in the world. I have _hated_ that I’m failing her. So don’t you, don’t you _dare_ try and guilt me into anything, because I already feel guilty as hell, and it’s not helping.”

Illya had turned to stand before his partner beside the hospital bed, shamed and remorseful. The vehemence of Solo’s outburst surprised him – Solo was usually much more even-keeled than all that. He did not let himself crack often; it was the English influence of his handlers. And he could see that Solo was right. His going on about it wouldn’t change the fact that Gaby was gone and waiting for them.

“All right,” he said gruffly, as close to an apology as he would get. “Let’s form a plan.”

“ _You_ are going to get back into bed,” Solo said, pushing on his chest gently, and then firmly when Illya did not budge, and then giving up and throwing his hands dramatically into the air. “What could you possibly do to help in a state like this? You were on the brink of death for a week!”

“I am fine now.”

True, the ground was tilting underneath his feet as he stood, and his resting heart rate was much higher than normal, and he hadn’t eaten a thing since the afternoon before the raid, but he really did feel well enough to go out and help his partner. At least, that’s what the adrenaline was telling him. There was no certainty that he would last much longer in this state and certainly no guarantee that he would be of any help when and if they finally did find Gaby, wherever she was. But the clock was ticking, and the longer they went without hearing anything from her, the longer he worried that he would come upon her corpse.

At Solo’s stern glare, Illya conceded, but only slightly. He said, “You will come up with a plan. I will sleep until tonight. When the sun goes down, we will go find her.” Then he got back into the hospital bed, pretending that he wasn’t overwhelmingly glad to return to it.

“Waverly won’t like it,” said Solo, settling back into his own place in the chair. He sagged as well. There was a healing bruise on his jaw, yellowish against his tan skin, that hadn’t been there the night of the raid. Illya wondered who could claim responsibility.

“Since when do you listen to what Waverly likes?”

Solo closed his lips. His fingers brushed against the bruise.

The story played out, but Illya did not care to follow the narrative. As much as Solo had antagonized him during the stressful few days of their first team-up, not the mention the continuing irksome relationship that had come about when their superiors had decided to make their trained monkeys dance a little longer, Illya did not like to see him downtrodden. It just didn’t fit the mold of Napoleon Solo, suave American superspy.

“He may have us killed,” Solo joked lightly after a moment.

“At least we will not have failed Gaby.”

That sobered him again. “All right,” his teammate said, tugging a bit at his waistcoat. “We’ll leave at sunset. But you need to regain some of your gargantuan strength. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“What is the plan?” Illya asked, putting his head back as requested. His eyelids slipped closed before he could even notice, and by then it was too late for him to turn back now.

“I’ll think of something.”

“You always do, Cowboy.”

“Glad to have you beside me, Peril.”

Illya breathed smoothly for several heartbeats until a thought struck him like a mallet on a gong. He shot up in the bed, startling Solo to his feet, the chair feet whining along on the linoleum.

“Her necklace!”

“Whose?” asked Solo, holding a hand to his heart.

“Gaby’s. The ring I gave her in Rome, the surveillance bug. It was a secondary tracker for location in case the first failed.”

“She doesn’t still wear the ring.”

“No, it’s a necklace now. I disabled the sound recording for her, but I kept the location capabilities in… in case. I’m sure she was wearing it.”

Solo began to nod, following along the train of thought as it barreled down the tracks of Illya’s mind. “Where is your equipment?” he asked, gaining ground a single step ahead.

“In my trunk, in the storage room they gave me as quarters.” Illya was up out of bed again, struggling with the ties of his hospital down. Solo pushed him down yet again.

“You really do need to rest,” he said. “I’ll go get everything, I’ll talk to Waverly, and I’ll finagle you out by tonight. If she’s still alive, she’ll still be by tonight, as well.”

The ‘if’ was troubling, but the Russian had no choice but to listen. He couldn’t very well go off on his own, like he would have in the good old days before UNCLE, because either Solo would just follow anyway, or he would have their superior officer sic a whole team of operatives on him to bring him back.

When the sun sunk into its early winter rest late that afternoon, Illya and Solo stepped out the back door of the UNCLE building, bundled against the chill and following a weakly beeping signal on a heavy piece of expensive equipment. If there was one thing Illya could appreciate of his KGB roots, it was that the assignment came with an almost unlimited R&D budget. The schoolyard rivalry between the planet’s two biggest superpowers was not without the advancement of science and technology, and the pinnacle of radio and satellite intelligence was in his hands now as Illya walked with purpose, his aching body left behind in the hospital room.

Waverly, Dr. Franke, and a whole team of nurses and scientists had attended him in the hours since his awakening, each with a varying degree of sympathy, frustration, and, beneath it all, so well hidden that he had to check twice for it, fear. His recovery was nothing short of miraculous, given that he was the sole survivor of those afflicted, given that Dr. Franke and her transplant team had had to give the virus a brand new name and classification, given that there was no cure and the treatment they’d attempted to devise on the fly had only had a twenty percent chance of doing anything at all. The good doctor of Solo’s acquaint had tried, fruitlessly, to forbid him from going out after their missing comrade, but even Waverly had shrugged when he and Solo had laid out their plan. It seemed that Illya Kuryakin, Napoleon Solo, and Gaby Teller had finally reached the end of their tether, and their superiors holding the line had cut it with gusto. They would be given free rein. It was an eerie feeling.

London, too, held a cloak-and-dagger intrigue about its streets as they went on their way, hailing a black cab and trying to stifle the sound of the beeps in the backseat as they slowly increased in tempo. There was mist on the ground and few silhouettes of commuters to break up the slow rush of shadows. Illya was reminded of the last time he’d been to the city; it had been under much different circumstances. If he were to have been told back then that soon he would be sitting beside an American CIA agent, one that he called a friend, no less, he would have laughed until he couldn’t breathe. Regret was a useless emotion, but he did feel a twinge of something or other as he thought back to that long week of the dirtiest kinds of spy work, the mistrust, the fear, the violence. His operations in the _Komitet_ were classified, but surely his peers at UNCLE had suspicions. Most of the other officers had not accepted him as readily as his two partners, being that he was from behind the Iron Curtain with blood on his hands just from the misfortune of being Russian. The men he had killed here in London all those years ago had not been innocent, at least in the eyes of his Red leaders, but he had seen a lot more of the West than the Communist party would have normally allowed, and he was taken in by the unusual idea of “freedom”. It had been harder and harder, lately, to separate his two lives. Each time he’d had to return to Moscow after the missions for which UNCLE called him, the Kremlin and the dirty, snow-covered streets surrounding it felt progressively more depressing and stifling.

As the beeping signal grew in strength and insistence, Solo grew agitated. He murmured directions to their cabbie every few blocks, and the silent driver did not ask questions as the instructions switched up at what should have been an alarming pace: “Left here. No, make a U-turn. Now right. Straight down this road- No, actually, go back that way.”

Illya felt a definite shift in the air of the backseat as the cab crossed the Thames and entered South London. Solo was looking through the windows and back at Illya’s machine, out the windows and down again in such a way that would make anyone suspicious.

“What?” he hissed to his partner at last, after Solo made an exaggerated movement with his hands as if in argument with the machine.

“This is where we lost her,” the American answered, determinedly avoiding his gaze by staring out at the moonslick streets.

“Do you mean she’s been here the whole time?”

“Apparently so. I am going to have a talk with Waverly about some sort of cattle-tag for his officers after this.”

The nonchalance of his partner’s attitude infuriated Illya, but he had a feeling punching Solo in the backseat would be a step too far for their driver. Instead he clenched and unclenched his fists, remembering the first time Gaby had settled his temper, one of the first times he’d been able to resist the urge to lash out. He’d listened to her then, even then, and he would listen to the spirit of it now.

When the beeping increased to a tempo as to be alarming, the cabbie spoke for the first time in nearly twenty minutes. “End of the line, chaps,” he said, pulling over quite suddenly. “An’ I don’t want to know anything about what you’re up to, so don’t go explaining it. This is as far as I’ll go.”

“Cheers,” Solo said, leaning forward to hand him several bills folded in half. “Keep it all, mate.”

“Ta.”

They got out of the car, Illya watching for movement on the opposite side of the street as he straightened with some pain in his muscles.

The black cab drove away and rounded the corner of the block. Solo lifted a hand to point at the building across the street. “That’s where we were.”

“Solo, if we find her in there, I will kill you.”

“Don’t worry, my friend, we searched the entire building top to bottom, plus the two on either side. The signal isn’t pointing there, anyway.” He turned and indicated the empty lot behind them. “It’s coming from there.”

The two of them went into the muddy lot and began to search. It would be anything: a manhole cover, an old piece of sheet wood, perhaps even a bundle of clothes meant to seem abandoned. In the end, it turned out to be even more striking than that: the disguise for the entrance was a square piece of metal painted and glued with a thick layer of dirt and grime, buried into the muck so as to be all but invisible. Illya only found it once he tripped and landed on a sharp edge that wasn’t properly concealed; the rain had washed away parts of the rocks and dirt meant to hide it. He wiped idly at his knee and watched Solo trace alongside all four edges of the sheet, whistling.

“Sometimes spy work doesn’t seem real,” he said conversationally as he began to dig his fingers under the metal in order to lift it.

“Solo, do you understand the meaning of friendly fire?”

“Your threats are cute, Peril, but they’re undercut by the knowledge that you don’t mean a word of them. You know you love my charm.”

Illya grunted a Russian curse and helped him lift the cover. It was impressively heavy, almost more than two people could manage, and he was sure this was not the only entrance to whatever secret underground bunker they would find.

The hole it hid was circular like a sewer entrance, with plain iron bars as ladder steps. Solo went first, pushing ahead of Illya, who was secretly glad to have his partner below him in case he slipped. That way, his landing would be cushioned.

They came out into a hallway straight from a sanatorium, floored and walled in white subway tile and lit by plain fixtures hanging at even intervals. It was empty and silent and cooled artificially. Goose prickles spread up his arms as he looked both ways.

“This way,” Solo said, indicating the tracker. “It gets stronger pointing this way.” He pulled at the telescoping antenna to lengthen it even more, ensuring greater sensitivity, and fiddled with a dial.

Illya drew his pistol and fingered it, reassured by its weight in his hand. He nodded at Solo, assuming a defensive posture to look behind them as they walked up the hall.

They passed several doors and two more hallways, each as deserted as the last. This was almost understandable if it were a civilian lab, with normal work hours for normal employees, but the normalcy was itself unnatural, as if villainous operations such as these were held to a different standard.

At last, the beeping became one long, drawn out whine of insistence, which Solo shut off after a moment of checking exactly where the trusty machine was telling them to go. Then he stuffed it into his trousers and too unholstered a gun. He made eye contact with Illya, mouthed a countdown, and they burst through the swinging double doors they had come to.

Gaby was standing in the dead center of their line of vision, beside a table full of the same glassware from the lab in Hammersmith. She was wearing a stripped-down version of their tactical outfits, and her eyes were bright and alert, with no sign of any sort of beating or abuse on her face. Behind her, holding a syringe to her carotid artery, was Galel Tawfeek, his eyelids low with unconcern.

“Guns on the floor, gentlemen,” he said. He’d been expecting them.

Solo and Illya both complied slowly, each making eye contact with their third partner. She nodded slowly, answering that she was fine.

“Kick them over here, please.”

“What’s in the syringe, just so we know?” Solo asked.

“Potassium chloride. It will stop her heart in a matter of seconds. Kick them over. I won’t ask a third time.”

Again, they obliged. The guns skittered and slid, coming to rest on opposite sides of the man and his prisoner, close enough for Gaby to reach if she were so inclined. All they had to do was get Tawfeek to lift the point of the hypodermic needle off of her skin.

“We’ve found you, Tawfeek,” Solo said, speaking seriously for the first time all day.

“Yes, many felicitations, agent.” The good doctor’s grip on Gaby was loose around the arm he held, but the syringe in his other hand was tight and steady, the needle just millimeters from her skin. Gaby herself was still and compliant, her chin held high.

“So how are we going to resolve this?” Illya asked, speaking for the first time. “We want our partner back. What do you want?”

“Ah, so you survived, товарищ,” Tawfeek said. “I am gladdened to hear it.”

“Your little experiment didn’t work,” Illya rumbled, feeling nettled.

“Oh no? How many of your team survived alongside you?”

Knowing better than to answer, Illya readjusted his footing. “What do you want, Tawfeek?”

The doctor twitched his moustache in a self-righteous grin. “Why, the same thing you want. Tell them, Gaby dear.”

She licked her lips and said, “There’s a mole in UNCLE.”

“No, not that, silly,” he tittered, rubbing his thumb on the glass barrel of the syringe.

“Gaby, don’t do that,” Solo ordered quickly.

“The mole told them what we were investigating,” she continued.

“Gaby, if you continue on in this way…”

“Shut up, Teller, that’s an order,” Solo barked, louder this time, his hands spread like he wanted to dive for the gun.

“Don’t you move, agent,” Tawfeek warned, seeing this.

“They’re Russian.”

“Gaby, shut the hell up!”

“No, actually, that _is_ what I wanted her to say.” The doctor took a deep breath as if to prepare. “Surprise, agents of UNCLE.”

“What do you mean?” Illya asked him slowly, ignoring Gaby so that attention would be brought off her. The past few seconds had been hectic and tense, and he too wanted to draw out the moment of revelation, letting every temper in the room settle and cool.

“I think we’ll bring in your so-called mole to explain,” Tawfeek said. “Come in!”

The swinging doors behind them pushed inwards, parting Illya and Solo as they each stepped sideways out of the way. Cecily Franke walked inside slowly, her body language cool.

“Cecily,” Solo said quietly.

“No,” she said, a single word, her voice wavering.

Behind her, holding a gun pointed into her spine, Reeve the tactical officer stepped forward as well. “Evening, gents,” he said smoothly.

“Reeve?” Illya was genuinely hurt. The man had been one of the only British UNCLE officers to have accepted him into their midst without the snide, malicious comments he’d endured from the others. Of course, no volume of bullying could have stopped him from doing his job, but it had been pleasant to have a second-in-command that did not second-guess him when they were on a strike of any sort. He remembered that Reeve had been directly behind him in the lab when they’d been dosed with the biological agent. Suddenly his avoidance of the infection made sense, as the three others who had died had all been more forward than the rest, closest to the capsule Tawfeek had broken in order to infect them.

“How long have you been working with Haik?” Solo asked.

“Haik? No more than a few months. But the Russians…” Reeve was enjoying himself, and Illya could imagine why. Living for years deep undercover, surrounded by people you considered enemies, only to finally be able to speak of your true mission, fulfilling years of work in one instant: it was practically orgasmic.

“What about the Russians?” he growled, his accent growing harsh.

“I’ll let them explain it.” Reeve held out a radio box, smug and British and traitorous in one motion.

“Курякин,” said a voice from the connection.

“Сэр,” he replied instantly, a solider and an officer to the end.

“Ваши заказы должны стоять вниз,” his boss said unemotionally.

Illya glanced over at Solo, who was staring at him in a way he’d never really seen before. If Illya followed orders and let Tawfeek continue his work, how would Solo respond? He could hardly well do much else except simmer, being so hopelessly outnumbered and with a partner being held hostage to boot, but he was not the kind to stand down. As a matter of fact, Illya wasn’t either.

“Почему?” he asked, toeing a line the KGB were trained to avoid at all costs. Questioning a superior and his orders was more likely to get one thrown into a labor camp rather than be given an explanation.

This utter disregard for Soviet rules reflected in several seconds of stunned silence over the radio connection. Then Oleg spoke one word, a grand sum of all that their forefathers had valued and died for: “Коммунизм.”

A jewel of pain dropped from his throat into his belly. This had probably been in motion for years, and he could see every step now as if it played out in a picture book for children: the recruitment of Haik and Tawfeek, famed cynics of Western arrogance and organization; an idea, ripe with the endgame of mass destruction of enemy powers without a single trail leading backwards to the Politburo; the creation of a weapon that could be used anywhere, anytime, and without any defenses; and eventually, in a perfect world, the actual perfect world, a united world of communism under Soviet rule. Everything had probably led to this. His acceptance into UNCLE, including blessings from his bosses as high up as the directorate, had been to ensure that one of their own would be in place to sabotage any investigation in case MI6 and the CIA got too close. And since the USSR didn’t half-ass anything, they had placed informants and double-crossers inside as well, strengthening their mission, guaranteeing victory. Illya was standing at a great precipice as his two worlds rent in half with his feet on either side. He would have to jump.

“ _Da_ ,” he said, ending the connection over the radio.

“Illya-” began Solo, so quickly that whatever emotion was in his voice was unrecognizable before Reeve turned the gun on him and fired.

Cecily screamed like a character in a dramatic film, her hands over her mouth. Illya had flinched backwards at the sound, spooked by Solo’s lack of faith, but he rushed forward in a moment before Tawfeek called for order, leaving Cecily on her knees beside Solo, trying to staunch the blood. Solo was gazing straight up at the ceiling, his eyes rolling, but the fact that he wasn’t dead yet gave Illya some hope. He turned to the doctor and pointed at the woman at his feet.

“Why is she here?”

“Reeve informed us that she managed to save your life from our specimen. We brought her here to reverse engineer whatever it was that she did. We want to make sure that weakness will not be present in the final strain.”

“I will never work for you!” she declared, her hands spread over Solo’s chest. Her curly hair had fallen over her cat-eye glasses, and her anger and beauty were a thing to behold.

“Doctor, now is not the time to hold principles,” Tawfeek said, moving his hand with the syringe to prove a point. “Either you’ll do it, or you’ll be responsible for both of these UNCLE agents’ deaths.”

“Don’t do it, Cecily,” gasped Solo from the floor.

“I won’t,” she vowed. “Kill them and me. I stood up to the Nazis. You don’t scare me.”

“Illya, was it?”

He looked over at Tawfeek and nodded, close-lipped.

“Illya, you have your orders. Bring her over here.”

He bent over and brought Cecily to her feet. She struggled, but she was as slight as Gaby, and he lifted her easily.

“Get your hands off me!” she snarled, her French accent as strong as ever. “Traitor!”

Solo had his own hands on the wound in his chest now. He was struggling for breath, his eyes closed and head tipped sideways away from them. Illya glanced at him once more as he led the doctor over to where Gaby and Tawfeek were standing. Gaby’s dark eyes were fixed on his face, but her expression was muted. She hadn’t moved or made a sound since Reeve had entered the room.

“Dr. Franke, I know you value your patients’ lives,” said Tawfeek. “I understand the sentiment, I do. That’s why I must stress the dire straits in which you and these people find yourselves in right this moment. I can’t imagine that you wish to see any of them die before you.”

“I’ve seen death, Doctor,” Cecily said scornfully. “And I’ve faced it, too. I won’t help a madman.”

Tawfeek’s cheek twitched at the noncompliance. He turned away from Gaby for a moment, his free right hand releasing her upper arm to fiddle with something on the table beside him. Illya had tensed his muscles for a fraction of a moment when he’d anticipated the movement, but the syringe with the deadly compound was still being held to her neck.

“Illya, hold her still.”

He did so, overpowering her struggles. He thought he knew what was coming next. Reeve was still behind him, holding the gun loosely in his hand as he watched, thinking he was safe with another Russian officer who was following orders in the room.

“I saved your life!” Cecily snarled in his face. “These are your partners! How could you?”

“The mission,” Illya said, monotone. She reared back as if she’d been slapped, right into the path of Tawfeek, who pushed Gaby forward, still holding her hostage and approaching together. He held a small vial in his hand.

“Make her drink this,” Tawfeek ordered Illya. To the doctor, he said, “This is a concentrated liquid of our creation, extremely potent. I’d say you would have twenty-four hours before succumbing. When my friend here tips it down your throat, you’ll have an eighteen-hour window in which to work; after that, well, you’ve seen what it can do.”

“Go ahead! Killing me will only keep you from getting what you want!”

“That is true, but you have colleagues, yes? Reeve here told me how you synthesized a treatment together. We’ll just have to get the rest of them. Surely one of them will help us.”

“You’re wrong,” Cecily said, but this time her defiance wasn’t as sure-footed.

Tawfeek stroked his mustache with his free hand now that Illya was holding the vial of poison. “Would you bet your life on that?”

The room stilled in a few moments of palpable tension, every soul there waiting for what would come next. There was an unspoken signal; the taught thread connecting them broke.

Illya lunged forward quick as lightning, grabbing the doctor’s wrist and wrenching his arm backwards, away from Gaby, who herself had moved, trading places with him, throwing her small body into Cecily’s to get her out of the way. Solo aimed a kick into Reeve’s knee, bringing him down, and then in a second they were grappling for the gun as shots went off in every direction. Illya made quick work of Tawfeek, breaking his arm at the elbow and throwing him over his shoulder and onto the floor with the fluid, easy violence of Sambo. He held up the syringe of potassium chloride so that Tawfeek could see it. The man’s eyes went wide as goose eggs, but he couldn’t protest because Illya had also stuffed the vial of liquid virus into his mouth. He put the heel of his palm underneath the man’s jaw and thrust upwards; the vial broke, and virus, blood, and glass shards dribbled out of his mouth and down his neck. The doctor screamed now, his tongue pierced and draining.

He stood and collected the guns they’d dropped. Gaby had recovered the gun from Reeve as Solo distracted him with their wrestling, and she held him still while Solo panted and climbed to his feet, wincing and holding his chest.

“How bad?” Illya grunted.

“Bounced off my sternum,” grimaced his partner. Cecily was half holding him up, rubbing a hand along his collar bone and neck in a tender way. “I don’t think it went any deeper.”

“How many are there?” he asked Gaby next.

“I’ve seen thirteen different faces. They have paramilitary, a small force but well-armed. They’ll be coming for us now because of the noise.”

“What about Reeve?” Cecily asked, shooting their traitorous fellow a nasty glare.

“He’s coming with us.” Illya went to grab at the man’s shoulder.

“Like hell!” snorted Reeve, jerking away with his hands still in the air.

“You will come with us with legs broken or unbroken. Your choice.”

The man waffled and surrendered, unable to see the benefit of fighting four people at once. He was sullen about it, though, his body language hostile like a teenager throwing a moody as he stood before them, driven by the knowledge that his gun was in the hands of a very capable, very angry Russian who had just done the unthinkable and betrayed his country.

Illya knew he would be hunted now. He would have to run to keep his partners safe; the KGB weren’t going to let him live to work with members of the CIA and MI6 now that he had rebelled in the worst way possible. This was their final mission together. He’d have to make it count.

“Tawfeek?” asked Solo.

“He will drown in his blood or exsanguinate, one of the two.”

“Good riddance,” Gaby muttered, provoking Illya to touch her tenderly on the arm. “How did you find me?”

“Your necklace.”

She reached for it, something inscrutable behind her warm eyes.

To Solo, Illya asked, “You thought I was going to let them kill you, didn’t you?”

“Not for a second,” Solo said, his eyes smiling. He reached his hand out for a shake, his face smooth and handsome.

 After they’d let go, Illya stepped to the head of the group. He confirmed that Gaby and Solo were both overseeing Reeve, herding him towards the double doors, and pushed through one of them. He fell back just in time to avoid the gunfire that ripped through the air and shattered the fiberglass.

“Back!” he shouted. “They’re coming this way!”

They would have to find another way out of the bunker. If this was going to be his last mission with UNCLE, he was going to see it through with his partners by his side, or die trying.


	8. Whitewater

The bullet wound to his chest stung annoyingly as he ran, shooting his gun blindly behind him, but really, it was the least of his troubles at the moment, and he was lucky to ignore it for the most part. It was the damnedest shot he’d ever seen, the bullet literally ricocheting off his breastbone with the littlest of blood and torn tissue. The shockwave from the impact had been much more troublesome, and he’d lay dazed and struggling to regain the wind he’d had knocked out of his lungs. He’d known Illya would act first, though, and he’d played the part of slowly succumbing to the wound until it was time to jump and begin the fight. Reeve hadn’t known what had hit him when Napoleon had whirled into a ground-based fighting stance and kicked his knee out from under him. His two partners had played beautifully, of course, and they had control of the room in a matter of seconds. To see Tawfeek choke to death on his own blood and virus had been extra sweet.

But they were in trouble now, and even Napoleon could see it. With their path forward to the only known exit blocked, they were on the defensive, forced to scuttle through hallways until they hit a dead end or a door to freedom, whichever came first. Topping it off, having to keep Reeve in line was an added annoyance; Napoleon was literally dragging him along by his shirt collar, half-choking him. But they knew they couldn’t kill him, not yet. The rest of UNCLE deserved to take a shot at him back at headquarters. Their fellow officers would be very eager indeed to exchange a few words with the traitor.

Speaking of traitors, Illya was in even worse trouble than the others, for he would be facing a second trial by combat after this first one, when and if they made it out of the underground laboratory alive. The KGB were not going to be pleased that their officer had actively sabotaged a mission that could have given them a brand new foothold in the arms race. The Cold War could have literally been won in the three minutes it had taken Tawfeek to convince Cecily to help him fix the weaknesses in his viral strain. When word got out that Illya Kuryakin had disobeyed direct orders to stand down and let the scientist complete his work, he would be a most wanted man. UNCLE’s international, pseudo-peacekeeping aspirations were kaput. He was a defector, plain and simple, and defectors to the West rarely lived pleasant little lives after the fact; they were hidden away, never heard from again, hunted until the day they died. Illya would not be allowed to live. That much was obvious.

This distracted clever, brooding Napoleon. He knew better than to allow his partner to be sent to a gulag for a torturous death. He knew better than to let him out of his sight after this.

“Our partnership is effectively ruined, thanks to you,” he panted to his friend, speaking for the first time in nearly three minutes after they had zigzagged a bit through rooms and hallways, all brightly lit and terrible for cover from the gunfire that followed them. It was lucky that the main lab had had a second exit, but now they were totally and hopelessly lost in the labyrinth that was this secret lair of evil.

“Would you rather I let him kill you all?” Illya grunted, following along Napoleon’s thoughts at a surprising speed, as though he too had been thinking of his impending execution instead of keeping his eye focused on the target at hand.

“I suppose it would have made things simpler.” He grinned cattily at the Russian and ducked as bullets shattered tiles in the walls only feet behind them.

“We’ll deal with that later,” Gaby said, speaking behind them. “I just want to get out of here.”

“Likewise.”

More gunfire rippled over them as they turned another corner, scurrying like rats in a maze. Bullet holes in the walls in front of them made unpleasant insinuations: they were going in circles. They would have to try a different tactic.

Before they could reassess, Cecily shrieked and tumbled to the floor, a spatter of blood sprayed onto the white tile.

“My leg!” she cried, holding it aloft. “I’ve been shot!”

“Hang in there, _mon amour_ ,” Napoleon said, speaking over the buzz of his heart, which was aching with adrenaline now more than ever since the ordeal had begun. He tried to lift her and found that he couldn’t quite do it from the twinge in his chest where he, too, had been shot. Illya saw and took over, cradling Cecily in a bridal carry, where she looked as disgruntled as a cat who had been through the wash.

Gaby, who was now holding Reeve still with a gun at his cheek, said, “They’re gaining on us, gentlemen.”

Napoleon tapped his thigh with his gun, looking up and down at the hall, hearing the shouts and footfalls of the paramilitary at their heels fading away. The pursuers had paused some distance down the corner, waiting to hear what the intruders had planned.

“Illya, we’ll cover you. Run down that way.”

“Cowboy, I do not want us separated-”

“We’ll follow you. Just go.”

The Russian obeyed, ducking his head and turning his shoulder to shelter Cecily as surprised shouts started up down the long arm of the T intersection. Napoleon and Gaby got their attention before the forces could shoot, Gaby crouched at his feet, he tall and straight, each one taking partial corner cover and shooting as far and wide as they could, letting Illya take Cecily to safety.

“Take a right!” Napoleon shouted suddenly at his partner, who obeyed and hung a sudden right through a door.

“Gaby, you next,” he said, lifting her by her upper arm.

“Together!” she snapped. Then she looked over Napoleon’s shoulder. “Oh, _scheiße_.”

He looked too. Reeve was gone, lost by their distraction. He was running down the hall, close enough that they could shoot him still, but why waste the bullets.

“All right, together.”

They squared their shoulders and charged across the open battlefield of the walkway. By the grace of all the gods that had ever been, neither of them were injured, and they were able to barrel into the same room in which Illya had sheltered.

“Reeve?” Illya asked immediately, glancing up from where he was crouched, tying a ripped piece of bandaging around Cecily’s calf.

“Another time,” Napoleon said, catching his breath. The room they were in was full of supplies, a closet with shelves and crates all the way up to the ceiling. “I’m down to three bullets.”

“None for me,” said Gaby with a wryness that he appreciated for its levity. “I only pretended.”

“For how long?! No, it doesn’t matter.” He rubbed his cheeks and felt the sweat there. “Gaby, how much of this place did you see?”

“The lab, the one hall where we started, and a storage room like this,” she said. She kneeled and dipped fingers in Cecily’s blood, drawing lines and squares on the concrete floor. “The lab sits off the hallways, which I guess we’ve seen are square. I was kept in a room to sleep over here. We’re here now.” She pointed at two places opposite of each other on the shape drawn in blood.

“The only place we haven’t tried is this room and the hall beyond it. There must be a main entrance, the manhole we went through hadn’t been touched in ages.” Napoleon paced for a moment, antsy and concerned. After the excitement of the past few days, he felt like he and his partners deserved a rest. There was only so much he was willing to do for the good of the world before he felt the trickle of nihilism down his spine. If the world wanted to eat itself so badly, so be it. He and Illya and Gaby could go relax on a Mediterranean beach somewhere, far from the cold, bullet-ridden streets of a country he didn’t even call home. He barely felt loyalty to America, even – it was they who had conscripted him into the CIA in the first place. All he’d ever wanted in life was nice things and comfort, a hedonist in the worst way.

“We need more weapons,” Illya said.

“I have an idea. Cecily, can you help me?” Gaby bent to help the doctor to her feet. “I’ve been listening to them talk a bit about their work since I’ve been held here,” she continued, bringing the woman over to the crates. “I heard one of them get reprimanded for allowing a small explosion – two chemicals got mixed-”

“That’s very common, if you’re not careful,” said Cecily briskly, despite her face shining with sweat. She was almost back to her old self.

“Right,” Gaby nodded. “Can you make a mixture like that with chemicals here? We can create a diversion, or maybe even hurt some of them and give us time to escape.”

“A Molotov cocktail,” said Napoleon, stepping forward to be a part of the plan.

It was organized quickly, with three cunning spy minds and one brilliant scientist hard at work. They built makeshift Molotovs using several conical beakers with long, thin necks, pouring into them angry-smelling substances as directed by Cecily. Illya ripped more of the rags that he’d found when going for bandages for the doctor, twisting them and stuffing them into the necks of the beakers. It was brilliant, beautiful work, and the three agents were terribly proud when they had five of the improvised explosives stacked, ready to be thrown when they made a break for it down the only corridor left available to them. None of them seemed to want to give voice to the terrible chance that they had simply missed the exit in the mayhem of running from gunfire, and would then be trapping themselves in when the Molotovs did their job and created a hellfire through which none of the paramilitary could pass. They just had to hope that the exit was further down the hall.

Napoleon hefted one explosive in each hand when they were through. Cecily had just so happened to have matches in her pocket – “I thought you quit,” he’d teased, and Cecily had tossed her hair, her old arrogance coming back as she struck a match, saying, “I did, darling, but some habits are so hard to break.”

He said now, “Gaby, you’re the fastest runner. You need to scout ahead and come back only if you do not find the exit. We’ll give you one minute. If you’re not back by then, we’ll come after you.”

She nodded solemnly. One minute was hardly much time to find a way out, but it was all they had. The paramilitary outside would know that they were hiding, and it would be a fight just to get past this door of the supply closet.

“Everyone ready? Three, two, one.”

The two largest agents of UNCLE threw open the door. Napoleon overhanded one of the flaming Molotovs without aiming, knowing there would be bodies there which the flaming chemicals would catch. To their grim pleasure, a man in a chunky black outfit was indeed leading a group of four, having camped right outside the closet, waiting to shoot them like fish in a barrel. He had the misfortune of presenting an excellent target and supply of fuel for the burning chemicals; the Molotov splashed on his chest, spilled down his legs, and shattered on the floor, spreading the flame. His screams were animal-like as he fell backwards against his troops.

Gunfire erupted again, but it was panicked, haphazard, the men packing a hasty retreat away from the flames, luckily in the opposite direction from where Gaby now streaked like a shot, her ponytail whipping in the air.

Illya threw his own missile, deliberately exploding it on the ground and sending waves of liquid fire after the bad guys’ heels. Little fences of hot, hot flames now separated them from the UNCLE agents, but the chemicals would not burn forever.

Cecily was timing it, her eyes trained on her watch, counting quietly in intermittent bursts: “Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.”

Illya stepped out into the doorway, taking partial cover within the door jam and lobbing a third Molotov further down the hallway, beating the men back. They were shooting in a more organized pattern now, and Illya had to duck back inside a few times before he could get off a good aim. He came back inside the room fully and growled, “We won’t be able to run after Gaby if they keep shooting like this.”

Napoleon tapped his nearly-empty gun against his thigh, thinking furiously. “Cecily?”

“Forty-three. Forty-four.”

Sixteen seconds was hardly enough time to make a good decision, but since when had that stopped them? He grabbed the heavy jug made of thick plastic that had carried the liquid they’d used for the explosives.

“Cowboy-,”

“And don’t ever forget it. Just follow my lead.”

Cecily spoke again. “Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.”

Napoleon stepped into the hallway, prompting more shooting – just how many bullets did these guys need, anyway? – before untwisting the cap of the jug and beckoning his partners out of the closet to go behind him. He waited until they were a few steps away and upended the jug, tossing it messily into the little streaks of fire that still burned.

The jug made a violent sound and erupted into a conflagration that swallowed the span of the hallway, turning the fences into a wall of fire for a brief moment that allowed them to escape.

Gaby was waiting for them at the base of a thin, steep set of stairs after they turned the final corner and came to a dead end. Her hand was clenched on the iron railing set into the tiled wall as if she could rip it down. At his sharp look, she said, “I’ve been up and out already, I just came back for everyone.”

Illya was still carrying Cecily, but the stairs were too narrow for that, so he had to support her like a father with a toddler in front of him, lifting her for each step that she couldn’t complete on her own. At the top of the stairs, Gaby held open a nondescript metal door for them and slammed it shut behind Napoleon when he came out into the frigid night.

They panted together, taking the time just to breathe for a moment. Then the pain, fear, and exhaustion of the night came upon them, all at once, and the three spies began to laugh. It was quiet, chuckles really, but Cecily, hopping on one leg, looked at them as if they had all gone mad.

“Over here!”

The shout cracked through the air. Illya lifted his gun immediately, aiming at nothing except streetlamps and dustbins. Napoleon and Gaby pressed backwards, each moving to shield Cecily out of instinct.

“Lower your weapon, Kuryakin, we’re in public for god’s sake.”

“ _Waverly_?”

Their boss came out from behind a parked car and strode to them quickly, shadowed by a small mixed force of agents and soldiers in suits and tactical uniforms.

“Through there?” Waverly asked, nodding at the door behind them. It was set into the wall of an old building, they could see now, coming out into a dirty open alley facing the street. Now that Napoleon had seen the inside and both of the entrances, he recognized it as an old bomb shelter, overhauled and expanded in secret while the poor residents of the neighborhood ignored the abandoned building as the eyesore it was. The place where Gaby had been taken, across the street, was much the same, tract housing and old infrastructure that had been shoddily repaired since the war and economy had both swept their destruction through London.  

“Be careful, it’s on fire,” Napoleon said, wishing for a place to sit down. Around him, the UNCLE men Waverly had brought gave him almost identical looks of incredulity, derision, and exasperation. He could almost hear their thoughts: ‘It’s those three. What did we expect?’ But their boss appraised them thoughtfully, beckoning them way from the door so the others could sweep the area and see what they could see. The infamous trio could rest and relax, at least for now.

Gaby stepped forward to Waverly and surprised them all by wrapping him in a hug, nestling her head against his chest. Waverly truly dumbfounded them by reciprocating, holding Gaby quite possibly tighter than she was and murmuring something only for her ears. Napoleon exchanged a glance with Illya, though neither of them communicated anything other than an understanding.

“Are any of you hurt?” their boss asked after a moment, releasing Gaby but keeping her at arm’s length, his hand cupped protectively over her shoulder.

“Napoleon was shot,” Cecily said, leaning heavily to one side.

“Cecily was too,” protested Napoleon.

“In need of hospital?”

“No,” they said together.

“Just get me back to my medical ward, Alex,” the doctor continued.

‘Alex’, Napoleon mouthed snootily, again making eye contact with Illya to share the joke. Cecily hopped over and punched him in the arm, then made a cry and grabbed at his hands.

“You’re burned!”

So he was. He raised his left hand, discovering a shiny red patch of blister curling around the meat of his thumb, trailing fingers of leftover flame on his palm along his lifelines. At the discovery, the pain tripled, and he winced heroically as she manhandled the digits.

One of the UNCLE soldiers came back up the stair and reported a lack of living souls in the bunker, though they had found at least five different bodies.

“There were more,” Gaby said. “At least thirteen different people that I saw.”

“Back to HQ, then,” Waverly said. “The van’s around the corner.”

The four of them trooped to one of the black paneled Morris LD vans that UNCLE controlled. At the car, Waverly patted Napoleon and Illya on the backs.

“Despite the overwhelming shitshow, I’d say good job, chaps. Are you ready for round two?”

 

 _Now this is more like it_ , Napoleon thought, curling his toes in the sand and stretching his neck so that the tendons there shivered with released tension. On his left, Gaby was lying on her belly, her head nestled on her crossed arms. Her face was covered by white bug-eyed sunglasses. She was wearing a white and yellow polka-dotted bikini, which he thought suited her fantastically. Some sand was sticking to the side of her thigh, and he had the mild urge to reach out and brush it away.

On his right, Illya was as pale as a diamond, hiding from the sun as much as Gaby was soaking in it. He had been forced into a pair of swimming trunks taken from the same rack as Napoleon’s, though he’d opted for a blood red that Napoleon had gone on endlessly about: “A little on the nose there isn’t it, Red Peril? Wearing your commie heart on your sleeve?” But the color looked great on him, and at least he wasn’t in a _telogreika_ and _ushanka_. In fact, this was the first time he had seen his Russian partner so dressed down, and he’d laughed himself silly – in private, of course, where he wasn’t within reach – at the absurdity of his partner’s complexion. He’d known the Russians were pale, blue-eyed snow golems, but this was ridiculous. At least Illya had consented to spending time at the beach, and that’s all that mattered in the end. But he’d insisted on a beach umbrella, and Gaby had dutifully massaged sunscreen onto his shoulders. Now he was sitting in a matching beach chair to Napoleon’s, reading a small paperback book, everything but his shins shaded by the umbrella.

They had been relaxing on the Bahaman island of New Providence for two weeks. It was a fitting destination; the tourist boom in the Bahamas had come around from the US embargo of Cuba, and Americans were everywhere, clacking around in sandals and flowing tops, drinking themselves silly and dancing to exotica music in palm-fronded dance halls. Waverly had sent them there together, reminding them that it ‘wasn’t a vacation, so don’t get comfortable,’ and yet they hadn’t heard from UNCLE in a fortnight, free to spend their money and sit on the white sand beaches until they were sunsick.

Their injuries had healed nicely, their muscles growing invigorated. His breastbone and hand no longer troubled him, and Illya had regained his body mass and then some, the great lumbering brute. Gaby was tanned and prickly as ever. This was the longest stint the three of them had spent together, and it was pleasant and companionable, free of the snit and sarcasm from previous team-ups Napoleon had known. He was happy to be in paradise with them, for he was sure being there alone wouldn’t have been half as much fun. They were able to retreat to their hotel rooms at night, but they came together again as soon as the sun rose, window shopping and eating and swimming in the blue jewel waters.

Of course, they believed their boss when he said this wasn’t a vacation, and they’d kept their eyes peeled. They’d seen drugs, crime, and corruption, but they hadn’t had a hand in stopping any of it just yet. The scuttlebutt amongst the lower officers of UNCLE was that they were going after Amine Haik, the second mastermind of the London bioterrorism plan they had foiled.

Gaby had reported every moment of her capture that she could remember, and one point seemed to stand out amongst all the others: Haik had been brought up by the workers in the lab several times, and the general consensus was that he wouldn’t have been caught dead in London or anywhere else rainy, snowy, or windy. The man was known to be a summer bug, as drawn to light as a moth. The intelligence centers of all the major government bodies – not just the US, the UK, and Russia, but other countries too – had come together with an action plan that none of their worker drones had been allowed to see yet, but it didn’t take a genius to connect the arrival of the three of them to a sunny tropical island and the knowledge that Haik still had many friends in the anti-capitalist circuit. The trio had seen other things too, and knew they were being followed themselves, shadowed by a backup team in case Gaby’s presence had been noticed. They weren’t exactly sure why she had been taken, but with the escape of Reeve and the intelligence of a major Russian breach into the security of their own operation, people were on edge.

Napoleon uncovered his sandy toes and stood, raising his arms to the sky and letting his muscles ripple. He had the eyes of several women on the beach. “Anyone care to join me for a swim?”

Gaby grunted a negative, turning her head to rest on her other cheek.

“Peril?”

“No thank you.”

Napoleon had a quip on his tongue, ready to cajole and entice, when a man in a flowing white linen shirt and khaki pants, who had been walking the length of the beach, stopped close to their campsite and stood akimbo, looking out over the beach. He was not paying them any particular attention, which meant he was observing them as closely as possible. Illya lowered his book, his eyes trained on the man beside them. Gaby flipped over onto her back and braced herself up on her elbows, her sandy stomach curling.

“Nice day out,” said the man, looking off to the east, away from them.

“Nicest one I’ve seen,” Napoleon replied.

“Which way to the beach?”

“Not too far.”

The man turned and handed him a folded square of paper. “7pm,” he said, and strolled away.

Illya and Gaby both sat up straighter, waiting for him to read the note.

“‘Loews Paradise Island, room 623.’”

“So we’re moving,” Gaby said. She brushed the sand off her sleek legs.

“It seems like it,” Napoleon sighed.

The three of them were silent.

“I think I will swim for a while,” Illya said, breaking the moment with a self-deprecating smile.

“Me too. Come on, Solo.” Gaby stood and tugged his hand towards the waterline, Illya in her wake.

Napoleon laughed a full-bodied laugh, following leisurely. At the last moment, when Gaby stepped into the water up to her ankles, he tackled her from behind, dragging her screaming into the surf. A freight car hit him from the side, Illya defending Gaby, and while the men were distracted with headlocks and armbars, Gaby came up from the foamy water like an ocean goddess, scaling their hip bones and elbows to kneel, victorious, on top of their shoulders. They threw her as far as they could together, sending her tumbling.

The night then seemed very far away.


	9. Torrent

The island had been a pleasant, sunny home for them for the past two weeks, but it was raining and dark when Gaby and her partners got out of the cab in front of the luxurious waterfront hotel to which they had been summoned. The rain was warm enough, so that it wasn’t uncomfortable, but her bangs were sticky against her forehead when she entered the lobby alone. They were going to head up to the room one at a time, pretending to be single, attractive, busybody tourists with nothing like espionage or revenge in their hearts.

People of all nationalities were milling about in the lobby, either eyeing each other hungrily in the long, gleaming, space-age bar counter on the one side or playing footsie in the armchairs on the other. She could hear at least five different languages being spoken, and she made a mental note to speak to Waverly about getting her some French classes. She’d always wanted to speak the language of love, and both Solo and Illya did not have French in their repertoire, as far as she knew. It would be fun to one-up them on something.

She ignored the front desk and went straight for the elevator bank, where a skinny, dark-skinned teenager was manning the station. She smiled at him and gave him the floor number, and she pretended not to notice when he tripped over his own feet when he went to summon the elevator car for her.

Upstairs, she went slowly, walking down the long hallway and keeping every sense open and receptive to subtle changes in the environment. Room 623 was one of the last on the left before a turn, and she glanced down the long connecting corridor before knocking.

She was let in quickly by a suited young man she recognized from the London office, though she couldn’t remember his name. She had to get better at that, damn it.

“Teller,” he greeted solemnly. “Where are your partners?”

“Coming,” she said, going to sit in the chair by the window, swiveling so that she could look down at the dark, glittering shoreline many stories below. Their romp in the ocean had been one of the most fun expressions of play that she could ever remember, and they’d all been breathless, salty, and exhilarated at the end, none of them willing to leave the water, probably for good.

Solo and Illya came along shortly, Solo leaving a smaller gap between himself and his partners than Illya had done; she could read his impatience from across the room.

“Any sign of surveillance?” asked the officer.

“No,” said Solo, looking suave in a short-sleeved polo. He was generously tanned from their two weeks here, she’d noticed.

“Good. Waverly wasn’t sure there would be any, but better safe than sorry.” The officer bent over the single queen bed in the room, unfurling a paper map which was lying next to assorted spy debris on the quilted bedcover. She stood and joined them.

“Do you all remember Nicolau Neto, one of Haik’s known associates?”

“Portuguese businessman,” Illya said. “Propaganda.”

“He’s here in Nassau, presumably on vacation, but we’ve had UNCLE officers on him since he landed on his little private jet, and he hasn’t spent much time in the sun.” He pointed to several different places on the map, spread out over the almond-shaped island, each marked with color-coded X’s. “He’s gone to meetings or meet-ups or what-have-yous across the island, accompanied by a veritable army of bodyguards and assistants. Each time he goes into a building and comes out again looking very smug, if you don’t mind the subjectivity.”

“And Haik?”

“We’ve _seen_ neither hide nor hair, but while the other men at these meetings are careful not to use each other’s names, our surveillance has created an eighty percent surety that Haik is one of them. They’re rather hard to follow after the meetups dissolve, with our limited resources here, and we haven’t been able to get eyes on the others. The intelligence is that the men responsible for the biological warfare plot are regrouping now that their little puppet, Tawfeek, is dead.”

“What about Reeve?” Illya asked gruffly.

The other agent put his hands on his hips, mirroring their frustration. He was younger than them, eager and new, and this was probably one of his first assignments in the field, supporting the bigger kids in their mission. He was taking it as seriously as she would have if she were first starting out. She was pleased he was there to summarize things for them – let the intelligence come from the deskriders, and let them get their hands dirty. She’d never minded grease under her fingernails.

The kid said, “He hasn’t been spotted in London, but we haven’t gotten a tag from his passport or any known hideouts he’s accumulated, those that we know of at least, so we’re not sure if he’s holing up in the country or if he managed to get smuggled out. None of the bodies from the lab matched him.”

The trio each nodded – they’d looked over the charred, burned bodies themselves, trying to identify each one and their actions: that one was there, that was came from here, that one stayed in the back. UNCLE wanted a clear picture of the movements their enemies had trained into their little force, to see if the guys they were picking up were just off the street or if they were funneling from some military or law enforcement background.  

“So if you spot him, he’ll be target number one, in case he manages to alert anyone else that UNCLE has a presence here. The most important issue now is don’t be seen. As far as we know, Haik doesn’t have any other master-villainy plans in progress now that we dumped the biological agent.”

 _As far as you know_ , Gaby thought darkly, exchanging grim looks with her partners.

“The world leaders want Haik brought in, no questions asked. At this point almost every government in the world would categorize him as a war criminal and terrorist through and through.” The kid faltered, glancing at Illya and smothering his awkwardness with a cough. Almost every government. He continued, “Here are your duties for tonight.”

The kid outlined the mission with only one small hiccup. At one order, directed at Gaby, both Illya and Solo stepped over themselves in argument. Their protectiveness was showing. It irked her.

“Gladly,” she said loudly over their protestations, taking the sparkling ball gown the younger officer was offering her. They glared daggers at her, but they had their orders, and they both wanted to finish this mission as cleanly as possible.

Gaby changed in the bathroom, slinking the soft material of the dress over her suntanned legs. It felt good both to dress up and to take the lead in a covert undercover op, but the long looks her partners gave her when she came out again felt the best. Both stared openly, their eyes hungry, and she flaunted herself for a moment, feeling beautiful. The kid was oblivious to her charms, however, and reiterated her mission for the night as he handed her a small, pearl-covered shoulder bag full of the equipment she had seen before.

“When will they be in the bar?” she asked, as confident as she’d been since walking the streets of London alone.

“Team Alpha radioed in that Neto and his men are on their way in as we speak,” said the kid, fiddling with the small audio recorder he would be fitting on her brassiere. He’d already gotten her permission for that, and she pulled the straps back down off her shoulders, supporting the bodice of the dress with her crossed arms just barely hiding her chest as she turned and allowed him to pin the recorder to her bra. This was apparently too much for both Solo and Illya, who made grunting sounds of discomfort and both turned away, their backs rigid. She smirked at them.

“While it’s unlikely that they’ll know your faces, HQ wanted me to repeat, three times if necessary, that you must be hypervigilant to the possibility that this will be some sort of trap. Solo and Kuryakin especially, you have to keep eyes on Teller, the door, their bodyguards, hotel security, and the other UNCLE officers from Team Alpha who will follow the marks inside.”

“Don’t worry, Parker,” said Solo, oozing self-confidence that Gaby was sure, this time, was as false as it had ever been. “There’s no way we can fail a third time.”

Which is how Gaby found herself striding into the space-age bar of the Loews Paradise Island on heels as skinny and tall as cattails, attracting the attention of most men in the room before they were consciously aware of it. Her partners were already in, placed strategically at opposite ends of the room, Solo roguish at the bar top, Illya sitting alone and dark in a private booth. Gaby had studied the faces of Neto and Haik for several minutes while the others changed into their costumes of pale, tropical suits and assorted gadgets, needing to be on top of her game. She was an accomplished spy, agent, and operative, but this would be her shining moment. The fact that she would be stopping the worst global criminal element in generations didn’t hurt, either.

She went to the bar a few stools down from Solo and ordered a cosmopolitan, having seen it in a movie recently. When the bartender asked her what vodka she wanted with it, she drew a momentary, panicked blank before chuckling, “The most expensive one, of course.” She took her drink to a tall table and arranged herself luxuriously, her heels thrown out an angle and chest bared for the world to gawk at. As she sipped her drink, which was marvelous, if a bit sweet, her dark eyes scanned the room thrice over, pretending to be interested in the male element in the room as opposed to the criminal one.

Her years at the car mechanic had not wasted her skills of observation and organization. Like with a car engine, all she had to do was lift the hood and take a peak before knowing exactly what was wrong and how she could fix it. It took only a glance for her to realize that there was something in the bar that was not right, and she would have to use all her knowledge that Waverly had trained into her long ago, before the two wayward spies of opposite allegiances had barreled into her life.

There was a man sitting alone – not so unusual, but he was particularly overdressed and seemed to be suffering in the warmth of the room. It was December now, and the children of the frigid north had had to adapt to the tropical oddity of the Bahamas these past few weeks. This man in his suit jacket and leather shoes seemed ill-prepared for a winter in the Caribbean, almost as if his trip down here had been unexpected – or he didn’t plan to stay long.

Across the room, at the open-air entrance from the hotel lobby, there was a mild commotion as a group of men entered and strong-armed their way to the bar, speaking to the bartender and apparently ordering him to rouse a not-quite-sober couple from the table they’d been occupying alone. The couple did not seem to understand the request; they were too drunk on sunlight and coconut rum to realize that they were being told, not asked, to leave the table to the six men. Solo, at the bar, had edged himself sideways, showing his back to the group as they’d approached, and Gaby now recognized at least one of the men, thrill exploding in her stomach like a small bomb. Neto and his cronies were here, accompanied by one Amine Haik.

The plan was simple: Gaby was bait. She would attempt to break the group into halves, pitting their masculine aggression inwards as she sauntered over and paid attention to the alphas, Neto, and now Haik as well, while the lower-tiered dogs would be jealous and hurt. Discord would spread through the ranks. All she had to do was get them snapping their jaws at each other over the gorgeous stranger who’d taken a shine to them. The ultimate idea was to get Neto, or even Haik now that he’d finally shown his face, alone, before she and her fellow officers could swoop in under the guise of law enforcement. UNCLE had expressed remorse that she had to be used this way, but she understood. Men were simple creatures, in her experience. The plan should be adjusted accordingly.

But the lone man was troubling her, and it had been a long time since she’d learned to trust her gut over her brain, or even the orders she’d been given by a superior. If she didn’t feel right approaching the group in the bar, she wouldn’t, especially now that she noticed the single man watching Illya in the far corner, nursing his drink and looking huffy.

She sat up straighter and dragged her feet under her, prepared to spring. Sweat trickled from her hairline and down her neck, towards the microphone Parker had attached to her undergarments. She was sure – the man was paying particular attention to Illya. Glancing over at Solo, she knew he had not picked up on this yet – he was busy monitoring the group of anarchists they had been sent to find.

He had told her, once when they were alone window-shopping the tchotchke stores of the touristy neighborhoods, how Illya was in grave danger now, far beyond the idle threat of the terrorist group they had half-thwarted already. The KGB were as menacing and real a threat as any she’d known growing up in East Berlin, but even she did not realize the depths of their hatred for the West, and for anyone who dared to speak against the party line. Men had been killed for far less than the drastic measures Illya had taken to save their lives in the underground lab. He had defied direct orders to stand down and allow Tawfeek and Reeve, that bastard, to continue their mission of spreading the virus. Now he was in serious and imminent danger.

Gaby stood up sharply, teetering on her heels. She caught the group of six men, finally settled at their table with the angry-drunk couple shunted off to a new place, glance at her. She giggled, swept her hair off her shoulders, and shouldered her purse. The small revolver inside was a welcome weight. The men, Haik included, watched her go, as did Solo and Illya, but she was careful not even to make eye contact in the glass behind the bar.

Alone in the lobby, she took a moment to compose herself, wishing her partners were with her instead of being left behind. She knew they’d take the hint to retreat, as she was improvising a completely new plan, but it might take them a few minutes to safely exit without attracting suspicion. If her own suspicions were correct, they had the attention of at least one enemy already. Their only protection was the publicness of the spot; not even KGB assassins would do the deed with so many witnesses around.

She took the elevator to the sixth floor. The hall was clean, quiet, and bright. Room 623, where Parker was holed, stood anonymous like all the rest. As she walked, her heels muffled on the outrageously-patterned carpet, she heard voices coming from the intersecting hall, right around the corner from where she was headed.

“-in the bar?”

“Two of them. The girl is gone.”

“Will the plane wait?”

“It has to. Haik's orders.”

She blew a breath out of her mouth and turned, knocking on the door of Room 610.

“Yes?” came a male voice.

“ _S’il vous plait, monsieur_ ,” she said, the extent of her French.

The door opened. She spied a young face, sunburned, unthreatening. She pushed through the door and closed it behind her. The man stumbled and cried out.

“Quiet,” she ordered in a harsh voice. The hotel room mirrored the one she’d occupied earlier, though in place of the armchair by the window, there was a baby crib with a round, pink face staring up at her. A woman was sitting on the bed, lounging in a tropical-print dress. She hadn’t made a sound.

“Who are you?” asked the man. He was American, cheaply-dressed, edging onto portly.

“I said quiet,” Gaby said. “Listen to me. When I come back, you must be packed. You will go downstairs and check out of the hotel. Don’t give any reasons. Do you understand?”

“You can’t come in here-”

“Shut up, Charles,” said the woman. She stood, sweeping the baby into her arms.

Gaby nodded at her. “I’m going to go back into the hall in a second. Wait for me to return.”

The man looked like he wanted to argue, but the strangeness of the situation did not allow much room for debate. He saw now the gun in Gaby’s hand. Shrinking back, he went to stand in front of his wife. Gaby was pleased with his mild chivalry.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she said, something she probably should have started with. “I’m sorry you’re mixed up in this.” She leaned into the door, peeking through the eyehole. The men had come around the corner now, heading for the elevator. She glanced behind her at the family, then opened the door and went out.

The men jumped at her sudden appearance and chuckled at their skittishness. She laughed along with them, keeping her face mild and eyes bright even as she brought her hand up and fired the small gun into the softness of the first man’s jaw, up through his tongue and palate. The second man choked and had his own weapon out, twisting away from her, and the second shot wasn’t nearly as clean; his heart kept beating for several seconds as the bullet traveled through his jaw beneath his ear, at an angle instead of directly into his brain. The blood was surprisingly minimal, but there was a small puddle as the second man resisted dying.

She ran to 623 and pounded on the door. It opened instantly, as though Parker had been standing there waiting.

“That was you?” he asked grimly.

She pointed at the bodies down the hall, and he helped her drag them into his room without getting more blood anywhere else. He went out to scrub at the puddle she’d left, and she changed quickly back into her pants and sweater, lamenting the drops of blood she found on the front of the beautiful dress. When she was done, she went out and knocked on the door of 610 as Parker mopped at the blood on the floor behind her.

The door opened to show the husband and wife together. They had both changed, and the man held two suitcases. Their faces were pale, but they positively blanched when they spotted Parker on his knees, a bloody towel in his hands.

“Forget our faces,” Gaby said as she walked them to the elevator. “You haven’t seen anything tonight. Leave Nassau, if you can.” The elevator opened. “I’m sorry,” she added, and turned back to Parker. “I’m going to get Solo and Kuryakin. They were talking about the three of us. Don’t forget that splatter on the wall.”

The young UNCLE agent heaved a sigh and looked up at the wall as the returning elevator closed on her.

In the lobby, she went straight for the front desk, interrupting the attendant as he was speaking on the telephone.

“Some hooligans were setting off fireworks outside my room,” she said loudly, pointing upwards to drive the point home. “I could see the lights and colors out my window.”

The attendant muttered into the telephone and replaced it into the cradle, surveying her with a mask of pointed attention, just barely concealing the annoyance borne of his work. “Ma’am, I apologize for the disturbance-”

“Just make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she growled, turning on her heel towards the bar.

Inside, Solo was still sitting at the counter. Illya was nowhere to be found. The men at the table, whom Solo was still monitoring, were getting good and drunk, exuberant with some success or another. Gaby veered for her partner and grabbed his elbow, through with the pretense of undercover spycraft.

“Where’s Illya?” she asked him urgently, dragging him away from his barstool.

“He went to find you,” Solo said, surprise coloring his voice. “Why did you change?”

“The blood stains were unseemly,” she snapped, the fear making her angry. “Where did he go?” She saw the group of terrorist men watching their argument as they exited the bar, but she didn’t care.

“I’ve no idea, he gave me a signal that he was going to follow you.”

“And the man who was watching him, did he follow too?”

“What man?”

She wanted to hit him for his incompetence. As usual, he was blinded by the finish line, by the thought of a job well done and a mission completed. He hadn’t seen the forest for trees, as it were. It was sloppy work, and he should be ashamed. But not now. Right now they had to find their partner.

“Outside?” Solo asked, gesturing to the front door. “I’ll-”

“Stick together,” Gaby ordered, glad to do so. For too long, she’d been following the directions and commands and instructions of others.

They slunk around the footprint of the building, wetted by the rain. The hotel was surrounded by sculpted grounds on all four sides, right up to the water’s edge of the lagoon behind. The property was large, and the ground was mushy, so their progress was slow-going. Luckily, they didn’t have to travel the entire perimeter; they found what they were looking for after only a few minutes, hiding behind the heavy brush of some landscaping that concealed a driveway that wound around, probably leading to a staff entrance. A small white van was idling, its taillights shining like a Christmas tree in the wet night. Gaby lowered herself to the muddy grass and slithered under, trying to get a better look. Two men were pushing a baggage trolley down the driveway. Their cargo was lumpy and covered with a tablecloth, probably stolen from the kitchens of the hotel restaurant.

“It’s Illya,” she whispered to Solo, who had joined her beneath the brush. Their faces were close together, and she could feel his body heat radiating off him.

Two more men got out from the idling van and came around to help. It was lucky they did, for as soon as the two leading the trolley took the sheet off the figure they had been escorting, their cargo struck with a vicious kick, catching one low in the belly and making him stumble and gag. It was Illya all right, and he was angry; bound at the wrists and ankles, mouth gagged with a heavy cloth, there was fire in the shine of his eyes, reflecting the red of the van’s taillights. He gained his footing and swung his hands around in an off-balance but powerful blow towards one of the others. Even in his formidable rage, he was outnumbered and at a disadvantage from the bindings. He slipped on the wet pavement and went down hard on his hip and thigh, the one that had been stabbed weeks before in London. The men took turns kicking him, and they didn’t notice right away when the one closest to the bushes cried out and crumbled, his chest punctured and deflating. Three more shots cracked out from the darkness, toppling only one of the two still upright.

Her bullets spent, Gaby followed Solo out from under the bushes, resorting to hand-to-hand combat. The man Illya had kicked was recovering, but he was scared, covered in the blood of his comrade who had fallen over his legs; he looked up and pleaded in Russian at the scorn on Gaby’s face. She swung a direct kick into his skull, at the soft depression of his temple, and turned away. The work was making her sick, just as it had in Istanbul, and it took her out of the warrior’s mindset for a long moment.

Solo was holding the last man at bay, circling each other like prizefighters in the ring, each wary of the other’s skill and determination. Gaby bent to release Illya, taking a tender moment to check his face for injury; they held each other’s gaze, and she swept her thumb down his cheek. He had a thickening bruise around his eye that would be a black by morning and a split lip that he tongued as she slipped the gag off, but other than that he seemed to be fine. The rope around his wrists was more difficult because of the rain, and she had to undo the knots and twists while also keeping one eye on Solo as he ducked and parried.

Finally Solo seemed to come to an advantage. Just as Gaby freed Illya’s hands and had him go for the ties around his ankles himself, her other partner landed a lights-out blow on the other guy’s chin. His heavy head seemed to fall faster than the rest of him, and he landed on the wet ground with his arms still held up as if meaning to fight more.

Solo knelt and checked their partner too, his hand on his shoulder protectively. “The _Komitet_ recruiting sure isn’t up to par anymore, huh?”

“Save your jokes for those who would laugh, Cowboy.”

“ _I_ thought it was funny,” Solo muttered as Illya was freed at last.

“Where were they taking you?” Gaby asked, helping him to his feet, noticing a slight wince when he straightened his torso for the first time.

“Airport. They are very much not happy with me.”

Gaby remembered something. “I heard Haik men talking about us, the three of us. They mentioned a plane.”

“Haik’s men, not KGB?” Solo asked.

“Definitely,” Gaby said, nodding her head, chilled. “They were watching the three of us in the bar, and they noticed when I left. They knew who we were.”

“Why _did_ you leave?”

“I saw the KGB man watching Illya,” she said, rebuking Solo with a glance. “I thought retreating would get you two to follow. When I was upstairs I had to ambush two Haik men – don’t worry, Parker helped me with them. I came back down when you two hadn’t followed.”

“I was sitting with Haik and Neto,” Solo said, a trace defensively. “They didn’t move.”

“Because they were waiting for us to move first,” Illya said. “Setting a trap for us would be easier when we played our hand.”

“It almost worked with you, Illya – they took you when you were alone, just like they almost did to me. Solo they knew where he was the whole time, and it would have been easy to lure you out when your partners didn’t return. I messed the whole thing up when I got up before I should have – remember what we were supposed to do? I was supposed to get Haik alone.” A trace of pride edged into her voice. The anarchists had set a trap that her paranoia had sprung before they were in the thick of it.

“Well, whatever’s the truth, more answers are going to be at the airport,” Solo grunted. He was ticked off, but that was okay with her, because she was irritated too. They could be in a healthy snit together as she drove them to the airport. She went to the van and dangled the keys off her pointer finger, grinning a blazing smile at them now that the tide seemed to be turned, finally, in their favor.


	10. Cascade

The drive to the New Providence Airport took less than ten minutes, but Gaby took a roundabout route to check for surveillance in case they were being followed. The KGB were usually thorough, and because the agents they had ambushed had been comically easy to dispatch, they weren’t going to get cocky. It felt too easy. The trap that had been set for them at the hotel was still hot on their minds – who was to say that there wouldn’t be another one waiting for them? It was the paranoia of a spy.

Illya sat in the backseat, nursing his bruises and a grudge. It wasn’t that he hated the people to whom he answered, like Solo; he’d found a home in the _Komitet_ , embraced brothers-at-arms and even an almost-father figure, though he would rather die than admit to Oleg that he regarded him as such. And the work that he’d done in the service of intelligence for the Soviet Union had been for the good of his country, if not the world. He still believed in communism… perhaps. The tipping point had been the moment his boss had ordered him to let his partners die and die horribly. He’d had fellow agents die in front of him, even in his arms, but the connection that bound him and the two others was unlike anything else he’d experienced in his life. They were _his_ , an ownership and a partnership that his country and government would have found repulsive.

He caught Gaby’s eye for a brief moment in the rearview mirror. The fear that he’d felt when he’d woken to discover that she was missing had been suffocating, the relief when she was back refreshing like the first breath after breaking the surface from underwater. Solo, too, was a part of this connection, though the emotions of that were harder to put to words. It was not dissimilar to that of Gaby, but foreign from the way he’d regarded his KGB peers. It went deeper. He knew that was why he had chosen them over the Soviet Union.

A jolt hit his stomach. He’d chosen Solo and Gaby over his motherland.

“Doing okay, Peril?” Solo asked without turning around.

“I am fine.”

“Are you sure? You’re awfully quiet.”

“When is he ever loud?” asked Gaby in a teasing voice.

“Maybe when he isn’t considering the fact that he’s a traitor, a fugitive, and a defector.”

Illya made an unhappy sound in his throat. Leave it to Solo to know exactly what was going through his mind. That was another oddity about his American friend: no one in Russia had ever read him so well, not even his boss.

“Wondering if I’m going to kill you in order to get back in their good graces?”

“It crossed my mind.”

A stunned silence followed, broken only by the hum of the van’s tires on the rainslick road.

“Solo-” started Gaby, but she let it trail off.

Illya kneaded his hands together, warming his cold fingers. Finally, he said, “No.”

“No?”

“Fuck them.”

Solo laughed, full-bodied and jolly. Illya realized that was the most genuine laugh he’d ever heard from him.

“Solo, how could you even consider that?”

“I’ve known more KGB than you, Gaby. It wasn’t an unimaginable scenario.”

“You’ve never known one like him.”

After a quiet pause, Solo replied, “No, I haven’t.”

Inexplicably warmed, Illya shifted in his seat and said, “If I was going to kill you, Cowboy, it would be for my reasons alone.”

“Jealousy over my stunning good looks?”

“He beat you at a chess game?” Gaby piped up.

“I took the last croissant from the UNCLE kitchens?”

Illya leaned forward into the front cabin of the van and quieted their jokes by pointing at a sign that indicated the next left would lead them to the airport. Gaby flicked her headlights off and swung around, taking the back way, circling the small runways framed by beach grass and flimsy chain link fences.

It was near midnight, and the airport was quiet. Arriving and departing flights wouldn’t resume again until morning. An ordered line of planes were parked for the night on the farthest runway. One in particular on the tarmac caught their attention; it was the last in the line, far from the terminals of the small airport, standing solitary and still like a sentry. Figures were moving around it, and a car was idling beside with its lights on, belching steam from its exhaust pipe.

Gaby slowed the car to a crawl. They had discovered a small cache of weapons in the stolen van, and during the drive Illya and Solo had disassembled and reassembled them, checking bullet counts and for signs of wear and tear. Now they slid the magazines in and fingered the safeties. Gaby had a cute Beretta in her lap, but she would stay in the car as getaway driver while the two others manned an ambush. They were far past the honorable delicacies of combat; it was personal, and UNCLE was not taking prisoners.

They parked off-road beside the chain link fence, partially concealed by some scruffy bushes. The plane’s tail was to them, and the movement of the men appeared slow, casual; they were not aware of being watched.

Illya led the way over the fence while Solo held it, attempting to conceal the soft clinking sounds of his climb. His body was sore, but he did it all the same, switching places for Solo as he vaulted up and over with the grace of a show-off-y gymnast. He flashed Illya white teeth in an animal’s grin, and they jogged, flat-footed and hunched like hunters, across the wet pavement.

When they could hear voices, they stopped for a moment and listened, hidden behind the landing gear of the second-to-last plane in the line.

“-no contact for the past twenty minutes, sir.”

“Блядь.”

“Calm down,” said a third voice, this one heavier in the dark. “Look.”

Illya and Solo looked too. Off in the light bleeding from the terminals, a car was swerving and approaching them with some speed, racing diagonally across the paved runways. Illya felt Solo adjust his footing, briefly leaning his shoulder into his as he retrieved his gun and let it hang from his hand. Illya did the same, a sick feeling in his gut. These were his true brothers, the men with whom he had been connected through oaths, espionage, intrigue, and patriotism. It was these men he should be protecting, not plotting to kill beside an American criminal who had only gotten his appointment through a dirty deal with his capitalist, for-profit government.

And yet, he tightened his grip on his gun and knew it would only be a few minutes before he used it.

“ _It’s them,_ ” said the first man in Russian.

“ _Quiet_ ,” ordered the heavy voice.

The car screeched to a halt, and a wave of men flowed from the doors: Haik and Neto and their compatriots from the bar, angry and tipsy, buzzing like angry insects.

“The UNCLE agents were in the hotel, but we’ve lost track,” growled Haik, his mustache quivering. “We _had_ them, goddamn it.”

“I have a team who reported Kuryakin captured,” spoke the leader of the three KGB men. The two groups were at odds with each other, standing on opposite sides like gangs sizing each other up before a street brawl.

“The other two are at large, then. And we can’t do anything with Kuryakin until they are taken as well.”

“All due respect,” said the KGB captain, without a trace of the respect he mentioned, “None of this would have happened if your doctor hadn’t poisoned my men.”

“Kuryakin _isn’t_ your man, though, is he?” Neto stepped forward. A trim, groomed fellow, the Portuguese spoke with the smooth reassurance of a tiger who knew his prey was trapped. “We know exactly what happened in our laboratory. Your operative reported to us first, remember.”

“I remember,” spat the KGB man. “I remember that your doctor put _two_ of our operatives at risk and nearly killed one of our most decorated. I’m not surprised Kuryakin felt betrayed.”

“They both survived, didn’t they?” blustered Haik, who was clearly growing impatient. From his crouched position behind the large airplane wheel, Illya could see the big man fidgeting, glancing repeatedly at the airplane and behind him at the airport, as though expecting the fabled UNCLE agents to materialize out of thin air. “We gave Reeve the antiviral and he slipped it into Kuryakin’s IV.”

“And that stunt with the UNCLE girl-”

“Not a stunt,” snapped the anarchist. “Calculated. We needed the UNCLE agents drawn out of their hiding spots, and what better to tempt a teammate than a hostage? She was treated fairly by all reports.”

“That doesn’t matter. First almost killed, then almost losing a partner? Really, Haik, we were told you were a professional.” The KGB man’s voice was slipping heavily into his accent as he grew more and more affronted, and Illya was absurdly encouraged by his defense. If the _Komitet_ were upset with his betrayal, at least they could understand it. At least they knew where he was coming from as he turned his back on his country. He wondered if this captain, whose name he did not know, was jealous of his uncertain freedom – it certainly sounded like he was speaking from a place beyond empathy. Communists did not have partners and relationships in the same vein as their western counterparts; the possibility of betrayal and undermining was too great. You trusted no one with the kind of trust that Illya had with Gaby and Solo.

“We did all we could do,” snarled Haik.

“We certainly got further in our goals than you lot ever have,” Neto sneered. “At least we got them scared.”

“They’re _terrified_ of us,” said one of the lower-tiered KGB. “They sit at their desks petrified of our power.”

“Yet they welcomed one of you into their most powerful intelligence agency.”

“Not knowing he was sending information back.”

Haik guffawed. “They know, Veselov. You can’t underestimate UNCLE’s determination the way your government has underestimated the West’s. It’s why my people have been able to accomplish things. What have you accomplished, really?”

“ _Enough_!” broke out the KGB captain. “This pissing match is getting us nowhere. Are we leaving Nassau or not?”

“We are, on _my_ plane, headed back to _my_ territory. The KGB is welcome to come along, but when we regroup, it’ll be under _my_ authority. We want Europe and America scared, do you understand? You can report back to your Kremlin that _your_ men lost the UNCLE agents.”

“We haven’t lost the UNCLE agents-”

“Then where are they?” asked Haik theatrically, spreading his hands wide. “You haven’t gotten a radio report in the five minutes that we’ve been here.”

“Neither have you!”

“Everyone under my command is with me here on this runway. How many do you have, Chernetsky? How many are missing?”

The KGB captain, Chernetsky, whipped around on his heel and muttered Russian into a radio. He got silence back, though Illya knew Gaby was listening to the transmission in their car and wondering where the hell they were.

“Haik is nervous and lying,” whispered Solo into Illya’s ear, just a breath above sound. “Gaby killed two of his in the hotel, he knows we’re aware of them.”

“We need to move,” Illya breathed.

“Can we do nine against two?”

“No. But we won’t have to.”

Solo turned his head to gaze into Illya’s eyes, their faces centimeters from each other. His heavy eyebrows were low as he understood and immediately disliked Illya’s plan.

“So. You say you have Kuryakin, and yet your team is nowhere to be found. Let’s get the hell off this godforsaken island, and we can regroup somewhere safe and plan how to kill all of UNCLE.”

“It’s your plane,” sneered Chernetsky, gesturing to the aircraft.

One of Haik’s men jumped forward to open the forward door and climb inside. The machine rumbled to life, warming up in the cold air. Illya leaned forward on the balls of his feet.

“Wait,” Solo said. “We can try to pick them off-”

“It’s too many.”

“Peril, for god’s sake, I’m not going to let you-”

Illya drew him to his chest, cutting off his protest. Solo struggled, but he was no match for a trained, determined KGB agent. Solo might have been a gentleman spy, but Illya was an assassin, and it didn’t take long for his partner to slump, heavy, in his grip, his sharp jaw cutting into his arms. Illya took a moment to make sure he wasn’t faking, which he wouldn’t put past his partner, but he was well and truly unconscious, breathing with the unselfconsciousness of sleep. Illya laid him down gently and placed a flat hand on the broadness of his chest. Then he charged.

The men were surprised but not incapable. After two of them fell to the ground, shot and bellowing, Illya was overwhelmed, his gun stripped from his hands, his bruises poked and deepened. He was dragged to his knees and subdued with angry, vengeful violence, while Haik watched and Chernetsky, the sympathetic KGB officer, stood by unhappily.

“Kuryakin, happy to have you join us,” said Neto, taking the lead. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, holding it with the delicacy of a rich widow. “Where are your partners?”

“Иди к черту.”

“Well,” the Portuguese said, as if Kuryakin hadn’t spoken at all, “here’s your man, Chernetsky. What are we going to do with him?”

“Put him on board,” he replied. “Our superiors want to speak to him.”

Illya was half-carried, half-wrestled up the dangling steps into the airplane. It was a light business jet, smaller than the one they had crashed all those weeks ago – he was confident with his ability to recreate that incident now.

The leather seats inside the plane were arranged one to a side, plush and brimming with overindulgence. He had to stoop to get inside, and he was thrown roughly into the nearest seat to the cockpit, his hands pulled together and restrained by a plastic cable tie.

The two groups of men sat grumpily in their seats, glaring at him. Illya bared his teeth at them, hoping to provoke them. He just had to get the timing right.

“Where are Solo and Teller? Why did you come here alone?”

He lifted his gaze to look at the KGB officer. “I left them behind.”

Chernetsky nodded as if he understood. “Are you here to return to the Soviet Union?”

“I’m here to get revenge.”

“I told you,” shot the captain back to Haik, who had settled in the back with Neto, harrumphing to take off already. “I told you, Haik. You’ve wronged the KGB with your mistakes.”

“This is about so much more than the KGB, you little worm.”

“Tell that to my officer here,” he replied nastily, jerking his head at Illya. “Your people wanted our help, but you also wanted free rein that no one in the world gets to have.”

“Jacobi, take off already!” Haik shouted.

“Yes, sir,” said the man sitting in the pilot’s seat. He got the plane from gentle rumbles into a full growl, and it began to move at a slow crawl.

Illya turned his head to look out the window behind him; Solo was no longer lying where he’d left him underneath the second plane. He swore under his breath and waited for someone to bang on the door in the plane’s fuselage, but nothing happened as the aircraft swung around and taxied to the head of the runway.

Chernetsky settled in the chair across the aisle from Illya. “ _I’ve heard stories about you_ ,” he muttered without looking at him.

Illya did not reply. He was feeling sick with guilt and conflict, and he was dreading the next few minutes of his life. This would be some of Solo and Gaby's worst nightmares in the coming months.

The takeoff went smoothly, and Illya stayed quiet and compliant. He watched the glittering island fall away from them as the dimensional cubes of the buildings stretched and compressed. The almond-shaped island was small, and the inland airport was still only a hop away from the waterline of the Pacific Ocean. In only a few deep, bracing breaths, they were over the waters of the Caribbean.

He turned his wrists and used his curled fingers to pull the cable tie as tight as it would go, working diligently. Chernetsky was speaking in Russian to the KGB man who had seated himself behind him. When the plastic was cutting sharp into his skin, he yanked backwards, his elbows tight to his sides. The cable snapped at the weak point. Without making it obvious that he was looking, he checked to see if his movements had attracted attention. He was completely ignored, for the time being. The KGB thought he was on their side; the anarchists thought he was subdued.

Chernetsky had a gun in a holster underneath the fold of his jacket. Illya leaned across the space of the aisle and plucked it up, shooting the officer before he had completed a startled cry. Both of the other two KGB he took care of in the next few seconds, splattering blood across the curving walls of the cabin. Haik and Neto were yelling, their operatives stumbling over each other in the close quarters of the plane aisle. One of the injured Haik men from his initial ambush had been carried onboard, boasting that it was only a minor wound. He rose now and Illya shot him again, crumbling him to the floor and creating a barrier over which Haik and Neto would have to climb.

He went to the cockpit and broke down the door. The pilot was yelling in Portuguese, but he had no backup and no chance. Illya took the chance to vent some of his frustration and killed the man with his hands, growling like a caged animal.

As with the larger cargo plane, he could make neither heads nor tails of any of the instruments and dials on the crowded flight deck. Outside the small windshield, he could see only darkness, and the faint glitter of scattered moonlight on the choppy ocean surface. They were still in a shallow ascent, but the dead pilot’s body would serve as helmsman no longer, and the plane flew now only through the inertia of the engines.

A noise made him turn. Haik was braced in the aisle, pointing a gun at him. He was fabulously angry, his round face splashed with red, and he said a few words in Arabic before pulling the trigger.

A bullet tugged at Illya’s arm, pulling him backward. He covered the wound with his other hand in surprise, genuinely taken aback that Haik had stood up for himself so. Neto was sobbing half-hysterical into a radio back in his own seat, and some of the men he’d shot but not killed were adding to the racket inside the cabin. The Russian strode forward, avoiding a few more gunshots by sheer dumb luck as Haik panicked. One stray bullet pierced a window, ripping the entire sheet of glass out and opening a watermelon-sized hole in the fuselage.

Illya grabbed the man’s shirt collar with his left hand and threw three hard, quick punches with his right. Haik surprised him again by fighting back, throwing his weight forward and toppling him over, but there was no room to fight in the aisle between the seats. Crushed, Illya could only turn his head so that he could still gasp for air while Haik wiggled on top of him, trying to gain access to throw his own blows. He wasn’t trained, however, and he was struggling with the vibrations of the cabin floor.

“Amine, who’s flying the plane?” cried Neto suddenly.

The anarchist got up from Illya with surprising nimbleness. Illya rolled, regained his footing, and found a gun on the floor. He had no idea whose it had been before, whether there were bullets inside, or whether it would shoot, but it was the last move he needed to make.

Neto and two of the walking wounded converged on him, pulling his arms back, half-choking him as they tried to drag him into the tail end of the plane. To what end, he had no idea – maybe they thought he was going to try and stop Haik from taking control of the plane in the cockpit? Who knows. He had no designs on the anarchist’s life. His plan was to kill the plane, not the men.

Strong arms clutched at him, holding him back from whatever he was trying to do. The gun was still in his hand, however, and Illya aimed it with difficulty, fighting the combined anger and drive of three men who felt this was all his fault, not realizing that strife and danger came with the territory of their professions. They were the ones who had climbed aboard an airplane with a scorned and vengeful KGB agent.

He pulled the trigger of his handgun. A hole appeared in the center of the aisle. Illya leaned his head backward, dropped the gun, and dug his hand into the folds of Neto’s jacket. The man shrieked with indignation, more appalled by Illya’s molesting hand than he’d been of the killing he’d been witnessing. He wiggled away, abandoning the two operatives he’d been assisting, freeing Illya for a better chance. He palmed the little matchbook he’d been searching for, headbutted one man, drove a fist into the guts of the other, and struck a match. Neto, standing in the aisle, saw this. He was a smart man – no one could have made it to his position and not be – and he connected the flickering tongue of flame to Illya’s sacrificial goal of making it onboard the plane.

“Wait,” he gasped.

Illya dropped the match through the small bullet-hole.

Nothing happened for a brief, silent interlude. The men who had been fighting Illya fell away from him, as though there was somewhere they could possibly go. Possibly they knew what Illya had done; possibly they realized they only had seconds of life left.

Illya closed his eyes and thought of his partners.


	11. Solid Ground

Gaby heard the radio transmission asking for an update on the team who had captured Illya, but she ignored a temptation to answer back a nasty taunt. She could see the two groups of enemies standing around on the asphalt, but she had lost visual of her partners after they’d climbed the fence.

The passenger door opened. She choked on a scream and brought her small Beretta up, but it was only Solo. He slid into the car and slammed the door, making sharp gestures for her to start the car.

“Where’s Illya?” she asked, throwing the van into reverse.

“Head for the shore, _fast_ ,” he answered. “Our stupid Russian is onboard the plane.”

“What plane?”

Then she heard the whine of engines warming up.

“ _Their_ plane?”

“Hurry, Gaby. We need to get to the beach before they do, otherwise we’ll never catch them.”

“What the fuck is Illya doing onboard their plane?”

Solo slammed the bottom of his fist into the door panel beside him, a rare outburst that surprised and spooked her. She glanced away from the road at him, concerned. “Solo, tell me. What is be going to do?”

“He’s going to crash the goddamn plane into the ocean.” Napoleon was frustrated with his inability to counter the chokehold he’d been caught in, but it was even more of a wound that he hadn’t thought of a better plan before Illya could run off on his suicide mission. He was smart, and he was calculating, and losing his partner to this plan was insulting. He should have been able to think of something better than letting Illya go off on the plane and kamikaze it into the ocean, and he should have done it faster than the arms that had choked him into sleep and left him lying there.

“God _damn_ it,” he snarled, hitting the car door again.

Gaby was cooler; she drove with speed and skill, headed for the ocean she could see glittering less than a mile away, thinking deep within herself. It was partially the defense mechanism of denial. She didn’t believe Illya would die, just like she had believed that she would make it out of the lab where she’d been held hostage for three days. Death was a foreign concept. If anyone would make it out of a second plane crash into the sea, it was her friend and partner.

One thin residential road took them straight to a rippling stretch of shoreline that had boats bobbing at harbor. Napoleon was out of the car before she could even fully brake, scaling the marina gate that cut off the docks from public use. This was a large, private marina, full of fishing boats and small wooden skiffs behind the rows of beach homes that guarded the sandy beach. He scanned, his eyes hungry for something useful. They needed a speedboat, something with a motor that he could bring up to speed to track the plane he now heard taking off over their heads.

They looked up together and watched the small plane. It was only a few hundred feet above them, rising slowly, wobbling slightly. Its wing and tail lights blinked evenly. Around them, residents of the island were probably being woken, bewildered at the idea of a plane breaking the evening curfew. Nothing was supposed to take off this late, for the sound was enormous, all roaring engines and sliced air.

He returned his attention to the ground, to the thing that he could still do to possibly, though it was unlikely, save his friend.

“There!” cried Gaby, who understood what they were looking for. She pointed to an open-topped speedboat, lined with polished wooden accents and brass fixtures. It was expensive, probably much loved by its owner, with the name ‘les amoureux’ painted in swirling lowercase calligraphy on the side. He jumped in and ripped the panel away from beneath the steering wheel.

Gaby climbed in after him, uncomfortable already from the bobbing motion. She hated the ocean more than ever after their ordeal in the Bay of Biscay, but nothing would stop her from joining Solo in their rescue attempt.  

The small jet sailed up and over their heads, out into the darkness of the Bahaman sea. Solo started the boat with a triumphant cry, bringing to life its lights and engine. Salty seawater churned behind them as they broke away from the dock when Gaby freed it from its tether.

“Where?” she asked. The marina was dark and barely navigable, for it was a maze of turns and twists they would have to take to even make it to open water. But Solo was beyond the idleness of talk, and she didn’t speak again. They drove through the marina with some speed, probably breaking the limits imposed by the harbormaster, sloshing waves through the shallow channels and disturbing the other residents of the marina.

When they found the mouth of the harbor, Napoleon braced himself and threw the throttle forward, not even bothering to warn his partner. He could still see the plane, but the lights were fading in the high distance. It would take a miracle to catch up.

And yet, as they raced over the choppy ocean surface, Gaby holding tight to one of the brass rails set around the rim of the boat, the plane above them seemed to grow closer again, as if its ascent was being disturbed by something. Napoleon leaned into the boat’s wheel as if that could spur it to go even faster. Already the boat was jerking and bucking over the ocean.

Then the plane exploded.

Gaby screamed, lurching forward and hanging over the short windshield. She clenched the glass, slick with seaspray, and flicked her gaze back and forth over the fireball and the smoke cloud that rose from it. Sharp pieces of the plane dropped like stones, splashing into the sea with great whumps. She heard alarms rising from the island behind them, and saw the reflections of lights flicking on at their backs.

“He survived,” she whispered. “He has to.”

Solo drove forward. His face was a mask, his elegant jaw clenched.

The wreckage was closer than she thought, and Solo began to slow the boat’s progress as they sped near. Gaby went to one side as he circled it, searching frantically in the dark. Sheets of burnt metal and steaming plastic floated and bobbed in the dark water. Out here, the cloud cover was fading, and the moonlight helped them.

“Take the wheel,” Solo said. They switched places, Gaby tottering unsteadily to grab the wheel and turn the boat with more finesse than her partner.

There was a big section of tail that had splashed with epic finality as they’d approached. Napoleon had his partner drive them as close as they could get to it before he removed his jacket and shoes and dove into the cold waters.

Small bits of the plane bumped him. One cut into his hand as he reached out blindly for a stroke, but he didn’t even feel it. _Nine men_ , he thought. _There were nine men, plus Illya_.

He saw his first body a few yards from the boat. It was mostly intact, but obviously dead; he pushed it away from him when he determined it was not his partner. He swam more, not feeling the cold, not hearing the gentle purr of the Les Amoureux.

Gaby, from the boat, saw him swim past a floating corpse. She throttled the boat ahead, swinging it around to get ahead of Solo. She stood higher than the waterline, and it was easier for her to survey the wreckage.

“There,” she said, her voice sounding grossly loud in the now-silence of the open ocean. She pointed Solo to another corpse, this one halved from the waist down. If it was Illya, it would be final, and she wouldn’t look at it again.

“No,” Solo said, his first spoken word in several long moments.

“Keep looking,” she said, as if she needed to.

She drove the boat around the wreckage site twice, circling it with the morbid image of a vulture needling her mind. Solo did laps, his easy swimmer’s stroke disturbing the bits of plane wreckage that floated, self-contained in the area in which they’d fallen. He pushed body parts away from himself as he swam, and Gaby had to kick a leg away from the side of the boat once as it turned.

Behind her, Gaby heard the dull thrum of more boats. She turned, squinted at the figures silhouetted by the illuminated island behind them, and called to Solo, “Authorities are coming.”

In the water, Napoleon banged against something hard. He felt it with flat hands, rubbing along the surface, trying to determine its approximate size, which felt enormous, and weight, which seemed improbably heavy to still be buoyant. Underneath the waterline, his hands fell away as they came to an open space. He glanced at Gaby, saw that she was watching him and aware of his intentions, and took a deep breath.

He swam down through the hole in the metal flank and then went back up, using his internal sense of space. There was an air pocket somewhere inside that was keeping it afloat, a bubble of oxygen that he prayed was inhabited by something else. It was pitch black inside the vessel, his open eyes searching desperately for a tether on which to cling. His hands went out, sloshing through the water. He had good lungs, and he would be able to stay under for a while yet, but his desperation to find Illya was making him light-headed, and he knew Gaby would not be able to rescue him if he needed it.

He went up, reaching his hands in front of him. His fingers broke the surface tension and then jammed against the top of the rounded section of plane. He kicked at the water and released his held breath into the air pocket, inhaling a new breath that tasted of salt and iron.

“Illya!” he coughed. “Illya!”

There was no response, but a search with his hands, out and fumbling like a newly blind man, turned up a sudden, startling softness of cloth.

“Illya, I’m here! Are you alive?” He dug his fingers into a fistful of the water-logged fabric and pulled it to him. The weight behind it was familiar, the buoyant heaviness of a person. He wrapped his arms around the body in the dark, first feeling for cold, exposed skin. He found a chest, and a neck, and a heartbeat.

“Oh,” he said, an exclamation of weakness that startled him. It was still too dark to tell who it was. He went for the face, running his fingertips along the planes of cheeks, chin, and forehead. Whoever it was would determine whether he would brave the trip back down through the hole together or alone.

Then: “ _Cowboy_?”

“Oh!”

“Solo, is it him?” came a muffled call. The churn of the boat engine thrummed closer, jostling the internal equilibrium of the plane section.

“I’ve got him!” he shouted, swallowing a bit of water and coughing it back up. He pulled Illya to his chest like Illya had done to him before, only this time it was an embrace of gentleness, not violence. “I’ve got him,” he said again.

Illya was breathing raggedly. Napoleon adjusted his grip, working harder at keeping his head above water now that he had to manage two souls instead of just himself. “Take a deep breath when I say, all right? We have to go back down to go up.”

The Russian did not reply; he was semi-conscious once more, roused only by Napoleon’s appearance and then sunk back into twilight.

“Three,” counted Napoleon anyway, bracing himself. “Two. One!” He inhaled a sharp breath and kicked down, struggling to pull his partner back into the depths of the ocean. _Down to go up_ , he thought to himself.

In the dark, he banged his face against the rounded surface of the plane, missing the hole at his first go. He felt his nose crunch, probably broken, and he released a stream of bubbles that carried his swears and animal cries up into the night. He released his hold on Illya with one hand to feel for the hole. It felt like he was much deeper this time than he’d gone to go through from the outside, and he was beginning to panic, but then his hand slipped into an openness of cold water, and he kicked hard with his bare feet, catching Illya’s trailing long legs. Underwater, at this depth, at this time of night, it was like the vastness and emptiness he’d heard astronauts describe for space, an eerie, ethereal awareness of being alone for miles and miles.

But he wasn’t alone. He had his partners.

Gaby hung over the side of the boat to the point of nearly tipping, searching frantically for a disturbance in the water that would indicate life. The floating section of plane was rocking gently in time to the ocean current, and it seemed to be finally sinking. If Solo and Illya were trapped inside, it would bring them to the bottom of the ocean as their catacomb.

There was no warning for it. First the surface of the sea was dark and rippling, then it was broken by a mighty bellow of indignation and human resolve and splashing. Solo came up only feet from her, carrying Illya under one arm. He swam to her with jerking strokes, obviously tired, and she reached for his hand to pull him closer.

She grabbed Illya’s collar and held him there while Solo hauled himself up into Les Amoureux, dripping and vocal as he panted and groaned. Then, together, they pulled the Russian up over the side, where he flopped into the bottom of the boat with a frightening limpness.

“Get us out of here,” Solo ordered hoarsely, sinking to his knees to inspect Illya. Gaby obeyed, bringing the boat from a standstill to a racing stallion in a matter of seconds, while the engines of the other boats roared past them and the men driving them yelled after.

Napoleon brushed water away from Illya’s face and checked his breathing, pulling him into his lap. They were both shivering. “Illya,” he murmured. “Give me a sign.”

The Russian turned his head but did not open his eyes. There was a cut bleeding on the side of his skull, and probably many more injuries to be found when they got him to the New Providence hospital, but he was alive.

Napoleon leaned down and hugged the other man, pressing his throbbing nose in the space between his shoulder and neck, shaking violently from more than just the rocking of the speeding boat. He looked up and saw Gaby looking back at him. Her cheeks were shining from tears.

“ _Spasibo_.”

He choked and straightened, gasping on a chuckle. “You’re welcome, you lug,” he said. Gaby stopped the boat and fell to her knees opposite Napoleon, pulling him close and down in a three-way embrace.

Illya peered at them through half-mast eyes, weak but coherent. He smiled.

Gaby didn’t think. She pressed her lips to his in a kiss that was far too long coming. Then she turned her head and pulled Napoleon into a kiss as well, sharing the glory and love and triumph of partnership. Then she broke away, touched both of them on their chins, and went to drive the boat again, ferrying them to safety.

 

UNCLE officers stood out in the hall, in front of the elevators, the doors, and the cross-corridors, grim and suited and fierce. The nurses in the hospital had learned to avoid the third floor completely, lest they be accosted and questioned, and since the entire floor had been emptied of patients save for the three in the second room on the right, they had no need to visit there anyway.

In the second room on the right, three patients had taken up residence, one in a hospital bed, two in armchairs, cycling through the doldrums of healing. They’d been there since one o’clock in the morning, when they had burst into the emergency room downstairs, covered in seawater, blood, and indignation. A phone call to the administrator in charge had cleared everything up, including the entire third floor, and they had been treated with care and confusion, one after another after another, ever since.

Alexander Waverly strolled from the elevator bank, tapping the point of his umbrella onto the slick tile of the hallway. At the door to the second room on the right, two men saluted him and let him enter.

Inside, Kuryakin was in the bed, with Gaby sitting poised by his feet and Solo suave in the armchair near his shoulder. They looked to him as one, and he thought, _There’s trouble_.

“I thought I should congratulate you formally, Kuryakin, on your death,” he said, unrolling a sheet of paper and handing it over. It was covered in Cyrillic, transcribed by a radioman that morning. It was an intercepted radio message that UNCLE had caught early in the dark hours while his assets began their recovery, sent from a station in Morocco over to Moscow. The fact that information like that could be wired to him anywhere in the world in a matter of hours still astonished him, no matter how worldly he thought he was, and Waverly was childishly eager to share with them the fruits of their labor.

“Are you sure this is genuine?” Kuryakin asked, raising his eyes from the paper and handing it to Solo without looking, as though he’d sensed the subtle movement Solo had made to lean forward to read over his shoulder. _Trouble indeed_.

“Quite so,” Waverly said. “Whatever the fallout, the Kremlin is certain you were among the dead of the crash. They are staging a ceremony for you and your fellow _kagebeshniks_ later this week.”

“For Illya too?” Gaby asked.

“Yes. For whatever reason, they seem loathe to admit to the world that their most efficient and respected KGB officer was a traitor who died by crashing a plane full of more of their officers into the ocean in a suicide attempt while in transport back to Moscow to stand trial for treason. Oddly enough.”

Gaby smiled wide. Solo matched her mirth, and Kuryakin raised his gaze to hold Waverly’s. “Thank you, Waverly.”

“No trouble,” he said. “I do wonder if we’re going to have to change your name on your new UK passport, but that’s an issue for another day. For now, rest and heal up, and please tell me where you’d like to be settled when you’re released here. London or New York or somewhere else on this side of the Iron Curtain, of course.”

“Wherever they go,” Kuryakin said.

“Ah.”

Gaby grinned at him again.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you three made it out of this one. I’m awfully proud of you all.” Waverly straightened up, exhausted by this admission, and turned to go. “I’ll see you at headquarters.”

Behind him, he heard his officers begin to laugh together, and he shut the door on them. _Bloody hell_ , he thought, and headed for the elevator.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's followed along, whether you've been here since the beginning or you just found it now! I had loads of fun writing this one and reading the comments you've left, and I will always be grateful to you for reading my stuff. Find me at gold-talisman.tumblr.com if you want more UNCLE nonsense.


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